Notices by Jenny List (jennylist@mastodon.social)

If you are a British trans person, join a trade union. If they come for you in the workplace, you will need a big stick.

When it happened to me, I was very glad of my union membership.

@aral

Something tells me this will be used to chatge black people more and keep them out of the stores.

I would like to try #Pixelfed.

But the pixelfed dot social server requires you not to post about anything illegal in the USA. So I can't.

Why? I'm a trans person. Trump has made it clear he's going to "put an end to trans ideology", which is likely to mean "Being trans on the Internet" becomes de facto illegal in the USA as the excuses to prosecute become very broad.

I'd try it if it had a European server. But right now it's problematic without one. Anyone know of an EU pixelfed server?

This has taken off, so i'd like to mention something else I am involved in. Trans Rescue is a small non-profit, we get trans people out of dodgy places worldwide. Currently that means helping American trans people leave the USA to escape Trump. Please help us if you can. https://transrescue.org/donations/bis-donation-form

There's a parliamentary petition for an independent review of the Cass report into gender medical services for young people. It's a highly problematic document commissioned by the previous government and shaped by anti-trans viewpoints.

If you're a Brit, you can sign it, whether you live in the UK or not. Please do.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700217

This post appears to be taking off.

Please give your support to Trans Rescue, https://transrescue.org , and @trans_rescue here.

Ok, a bit of good news from this year.

Dora Richter was one of the first trans women to receive gender reassignment surgery, in Berlin.

She was for years believed to have died in the Nazi raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the world's first gender clinic, because she disappeared afterwards

This year it was found that she got away from Berlin to her home village in what is now Czechia, survived the war and forced relocation to Germany, and died an old lady in the sixties.

We're used to billionaire tech company owners being dicks, because that's the way a load of them seem to roll. Not much we can do about that, except leave their platforms.

We shouldn't become used to the originators of open source software projects being dicks though. We can and should have a robust mechanism for sidelining them.

Can anyone identify this connector?

A @trans_rescue passenger made this for me, I have it hanging above my bench and I think it's really cool. They seemed surprised when we said "That's awesome, you could make those and sell them!". Would any of you buy a crochet resistor keychain from them if you could?

Getting angry on social media about the far right Israeli government's genocidal erasure of Gaza and its people feels so damn futile.

My country's government is happily selling them the weapons, making them complicit in the war crimes.

It may be futile to say this here, but not in my name.

I started with the idea of a review of the trans campaigns, but soon found something else entirely. I saw an anomaly, something that shouldn’t have been there. An otherwise promising trans candidate sank without trace, their campaign much smaller than it should have been.

There was still some hope for trans people in the campaign, as across the country there were a variety of strong candidates from our community. A few brave independent candidates took to the hustings, as well as those for Labour, the Greens, and the Liberal Democrats.

Sadly for trans people there’s not much to celebrate among those figures, as there are still none of us in parliament. The UK’s first openly transgender MP Jamie Wallis is no longer there, having come out as trans in 2022 while a sitting Conservative MP.

The 2024 GE is over, the people have cast their votes, Keir Starmer is PM with a significant mandate and a huge majority. We have the most representative Parliament in our history, and while it’s clear some of those figures still have a way to go, it’s still a cause for joy.

It’s so consistent that anomalies stick out like the proverbial sore thumb, and there’s one seat in particular which stood out as having an almost non-existent campaign for a promising trans Labour candidate in a seat which should have been winnable.

When you look at the footprint left by a campaign it’s easy to spot how it went and how many resources each party put into it. This maps pretty consistently onto the expected chance of winning, so a campaign in an unwinnable seat will be tiny compared to that in a key marginal.

In other words, while Emily didn’t have IoW East in the bag, she was unexpectedly in with a plausible shot of being elected just as her colleague in the very similar IoW West was. While she wasn’t guaranteed a win, she should have done much better than she did.

The IoW has always been a Conservative stronghold, and with the exception of a Labour county councillor in Cowes, remained in political terms unusually homogenious Conservative territory. In the 2024 GE though, IoW West went for Labour, while in IoW East they were nowhere.

The constituency would have been seen as a Conservative safe seat that wouldn’t have worried the Labour leadership back when Emily was selected as a candidate, but in this most unusual of elections it shifted to become a marginal at which Labour could take a fair shot.