Notices by Cait the Proud Trans Woman (oldladyplays@wargamers.social)

#trans #MutualAid

An update on the Black trans woman from the US who is making an asylum claim here in Canada. Zara has had her claim finished, submitted, and accepted, and has a hearing today in Vancouver about determining her eligibility. My understanding is that this step is for weeding out the no-hope applications, so we're feeling fairly confident we'll get past it. Zara's application is based on strong evidence.

If any of you have any money to spare, we're making one more drive to keep her fed and housed - it should, by ordinary timelines, be about a month or so before she receives a SIN and a work permit.

She will find work quickly, and be reasonably well-paid as a massage therapist.

So it's about one more month we're hoping to raise, and our aim point is another CAD1000 from where we're at today:

https://gogetfunding.com/help-zara-reach-safety/

Anything you can manage is a help, and if you can't, you owe no apology. We all have our own situations and needs, and no disrespect should come to someone who can't find it to spare right now.

If you need a different way to contribute, such as Wise or the like from the UK, please DM me on Signal at oldladyplays.11

I can share my banking info there to facilitate your donation.

I am not being paid for this work. I am working as a community activist, for my community, in providing what aid my white privilege can access for her. It is my belief that given her vulnerable status between states, it would be unethical to expect her to make reasonable choices about what my work is worth to her.

The goal here is refugee status eligibility for all trans/nb people in the US, here in Canada.

I'm also working a second path, trying to get Temporary Protective Status made into a thing in Canada, which might soothe conservative freakouts about a sudden large influx of trans folk.

I can explain how I'd see that working, and give you some talking points to build off in a submission to your own MP.

Thanks for reading to the end.

Have a gold star.⭐

One of the things I often say when I help someone is, "pay it forward when you can."

And I want to just open that tin up a little, and have a peek inside, because I think it's more sneaky good than people think it is.

So, for those who haven't encountered it before, the idea is that if I help you, but there's nothing I need from you in return, then you feel a debt. Pay it forward says "Your debt is to our shared community." And it means you can pay off that debt whenever you have the means, *even if the original favour came from someone no longer around.*

In this way, this behaviour sneaks in community building in a long-term way. Because while I'm only one elder among a few here, doing my best to be a help to as many as need me, the odds that any of these people I'm helping will be in a position to help with something I need is rather slim. For one thing, the odds are good that my remaining best-before time is about 30 years. In the scheme of things, when many of my friends are in their 20s and 30s, this means I may well be gone when they are in a place to help the way I have. And I won't need the help anyway.

But if they all remember to pay it forward...then they in turn create a generation that owes them a debt of gratitude. Which makes them want to give back.

And slowly, a community grows, that supports one another the way they were supported earlier.

So when I say that, I'm not just tossing a slogan at you without thought. I'm telling you my piece of how we make a community for our people. Take that piece, and use it when you build something for our community. And so on.

Y'all are my people. Just as I am your people. And if we work together, we can only get stronger as a group, a bouquet of identities, and as a community.

I know the Dunning-Krueger Hypothesis has been discredited in some manner, but I did want to introduce a very serious piece of evidence that backs them up.

Donald Trump, doubling down on tariffs if SCOTUS blocks them.

That is all.

#uspol

We've all heard the tale of how to own a Nazi bar, i'm fairly sure.

I was drumming up interest in a local board game group i really enjoy, on my local queer Discord server. I got some interest.

Someone on the board games group's server asked "why did you make a point about us being queer friendly?" Not rudely, just curious.

"Because a lot of community groups are invisibly closed to us. We daren't reveal ourselves because of antipathy to queer folk. This place doesn't do that, at all. So i tell people it's safe, and they feel more comfy coming along."

Someone said, "Oh, so it's like the Nazi bar story, only good." I thought for a moment, and they're right. Sort of. Because unlike Nazis, queer folk aren't an invasive species. We don't push people out. Assholes just self-select choosing not to be associated with a bar that's queer-friendly.

Which is fine, system working as designed.

So...how do we tell the tale of the Queer-friendly bar, and the positive feedback loop that can occur when a business is explicitly friendly to queer folk?

Cause I think that could be a simple, true, and effective point about the great difference between choosing to be nice to Nazis instead of queer folk. Or vice versa, being nice to queers and bum-rushing the Nazis.

The Nazi Bar story is one we all know. Anyone got a proposal for how to do a good tale of how the bar got so lively? "Oh, I bought a drink for this gay fella once, and soon there were loads. But they're great guys, and if ya tell them no, they stop bugging ya, which is giving me weird feelings about how I treat women. And we get a lot fewer assholes, too."

Someone? Got a seed for the good story lurking here? I wanna make us some rippin' good properganda.

A thought about #uspol: one Afghan man shoots but not kills two Nat Guard members*. I hope all three recover.

* I'm told one of the two has died, which is a tragic waste of a young life. This is an edit.

What's interesting is the response: "re-vet all the Afghani-Americans in the country!"

Because one was killed, and another badly wounded.

300 mass shootings a year, killing thousands.

Response:

I wonder sometimes what the problem is that the US is currently suffering from. And i think i have it. The core element that underlies Trumpism. It's Teh Stoopid, stupid.

Okay, technically not true. It's really ignorance. But at some point, well-educated people started to vote against giving their *kids* a good education.

And it's really biting them in the ass now.

The illiteracy, that gets talked about a bunch.

But i think it's the innumeracy that is more crucial atm. E.g., the $2000 cheque that Trump promised from the tariff revenues.

Let's steel-man this. Say he only meant people over 21. That's 70% of the pop; 238 Million people.

$2000 each is 2×10^3 × 2.4 x 10^8.

That is, then, conservatively, a 476 Billion commitment.

According to the Yale budget lab, latest figures on tariffs are 111B this year. Note that includes before Trump became Pres, and months before his tariffs went into effect. So it's a maximal estimate by a trustable source.

So all that needs to happen then is to wait 4 years or so, when the tariffs will have risen to over 450B, to cover the cheques he wants to send.

That's the *best-case* scenario for him.

It's an evidently absurd promise that won't happen. Like the 17T - sorry, i meant 21T, but - no, wait, it's now 25 unbelievable trillions of dollars to be invested in manufacturing things Stateside.

So the entire world, except the US, accounted for 75T in GDP last year. So he wants us to believe that because he's squeezed 111B out of US consumers' pockets, the rest of the world are going to spend a third of an entire year's GDP to capture a market making up about 3% of the world's population?

And people believe this rank pangolin turd.

It's a deadly combination of exceptionalist propaganda, poor education, anti-intellectualism, and thus widespread ignorance of basic critical thinking tools.

Trump says he's making the world respect the US. What we see is a country so ignorant they thought this guy knew business.

#uspol

@hellomiakoda

Yeah, lesbian was definitely my jam when i transitioned, and for maybe 12 years? But when i had bottom surgery - causing both my terrible dysphoria to go, and opening the door for the first time for someone other than a rare doctor or two to touch me in that area. And i was very surprised to discover that without one, for me, i wasn't nearly as bothered about penes or others' gender or bodily configs as i had been.

I stress this is MY experience, and i don't claim it applies to anyone else. It may, or it may not. I'm not trying to convert anyone to pan.

Just saying that it was my experience that transition revealed to me things about myself that i didn't know before had existed.

Like that i genuinely get pleasure and pride from being helpful and kind. I like being that person. That I can find or deliver pleasure to just about any human being, if they consent. I'm kinda good at it, even.

That distilling my life into lessons can be a skill i can claim to be legitimately good at.

That i am a True Believer in "Teamwork Makes the Dream Work!" That a well-practiced team can exceed the sum of their parts.

That i run on hope. Without it i would wither and fade. With it, i can shift heavy things. Like cities and school boards.

That for some reason, most of the best human beings i've ever known had darker skin than I, and most of those had African features.

That logic and critical thinking are our best features, and too many of us squander those gifts unappreciated.

That I can be both openly pansexual, and culturally lesbian. They are my people at my core. Where i first came out, where i lived for 12 years, where i was first accepted as a woman. Where i can always turn for old friends.

That my trans boyfriend does not invalidate that, and *not* because of his AGAB. Because his masculinity is bold and protective and loving and queer and vulnerable and his.

Whoo. Guess i had summat to say. 😁

@hellomiakoda

Interesting. I'm pan myself. I reason that i know how to give pleasure with the various configs I've encountered, and my config.ini file has plenty of room remaining for encounters with new setups.

And since looks don't hugely matter to me, that leaves me with a potential dating pool of..."Siri, how many people as of midnight my time tonight will be queer in some manner that includes me, between 42 and 62, and not highly aggressive?"

Whatever she says, that's how many.

Maybe a decibillion?

Gosh, a socialist mayor would be *just awful*!

We've got a lovely wealthy woman, who's kind enough to donate her time in return for a piddling couple of hundred thousand a year. I know, right? It seems hardly worth getting out of bed for. But she strives. Anyway, she's been super for the local housing market, very carefully keeping the council from doing anything too populist, like re-zoning things to encourage infill densification and thus *increase the supply of housing* in a town which has nearly tripled in size in the 33 years I've lived here, and is now planned to reach 1,000,000 people in about five years. But she holds the line! So Line Go Up on housing, which makes everyone very happy, as long as they're one of the relatively few who own a house. Not so much if you rent it, of course.

And we continue to have not one but *two* entire 18-hole golf courses *within city limits*. Which seems a terrific use of green space in a city with a hard border as a town limit, by popular demand, don't you think? Enough golf facilities for probably, what...maybe as many as 100 players at a time, across two facilities! And is in no way related to the fast-growing number of homeless people now sleeping in the encampment near the train station.

But yeah...a socialist mayor. Gosh, what a nightmare, huh? Economy focused on the common good, instead of Line Go Up Faster Every Year? Improving the supply of social housing...maybe by distributing Tiny Houses on some parkland that's not being much used right now except for some people spoiling a good walk, as the saying goes. Making buses free, since we pay for everything the for-profit company uses to make its profit off our property. Non-profit supermarkets, with good healthy food at a reasonable price. On the transit lines.

What a nightmare.

Sigh.

I should be so lucky.

So, an idea I just had. I was introducing two people i knew to one another.

I told each of them three pieces of information (in an email; orally this would change a bit, see below). The name, pronunciation, and their pronouns.

So...let's say it's two of my friends who are activists. One is Oloseun (she/her), the other Mya (they/them).

"Hi, folks. Oloseun (o-LOtion she/her), meet Mya (MAya, they/them)."

Orally? I'd say the name a second time, to give the pronunciation clearly, and finish with pronouns.

As we move into a world where more and more people from not-solely-anglo-places come into what had been much more white-focused places, it is more important to learn one another's names well. It's basic respect. And it's something anglophones are particularly bad at.

Aim your pronunciation guide at your friend's level and background of linguistic knowledge. If they know IPA, use it. If not, use one that tries to make unique sound markers for a given sound. It doesn't need perfection. Get someone in range, and the other will feel more comfortable correcting them.

Use psych knowledge to help yourself. 🙂

At school* Friday morning, I was mildly disturbed to see one of the few masc-presenting people in the class arrive dressed as Harry Potter. Others were in various costumes. I waited through the guest speaker, then caught up with him at break.

I said, "this is unofficial, k? I'm speaking here as a trans woman in your community, not a lab instructor. This will not affect my evaluation of your work.

"But you do know that that gear is going to make for unhappy days for any trans or nonbinary person, and many other queer groups?"

He says, "Oh, yeah, I know about Rowling being TERF and such, but i thought since I do know that, it would be ok."

I looked at him dubiously. Social work student, mind.

"For me? That doesn't really mitigate you helping to fund my loss of rights. So...why not subvert it instead? You wanna do HP, first, don't buy any more merch. Second, you don't do Potter.

"You do Herman Grainger. A trans guy. Curly hair, haughty attitude, swot, top student vibe. Subvert it! Make it something JKR would hate. That's a powerful message of allyship, instead of building her anti-trans war chest."

He liked the idea. And I think got the deeper lesson, about being in a social justice field, you need to think about these things. If you had a trans client who came in on Hallowe'en, how are they going to feel seeing you wear merch that enriches someone who wants them not to exist?

Great teachable moment, and I think he got the idea. No further action needed, to me.

* I'm working, as every autumn, at a local small college that has a Bachelor of Social Work program, as well as a summer intensive MSW program. I'm one of three long-time activists teaching community organising alongside a prof of social work. We 3 are the lab instructors. Class goal: plan and execute a social action. A rally, sit-in, whatever. Something disruptive. They get 10 weeks to plan what we each could do and have done in three days. It's a fun job. Radicalising young social workers. 💚

Happy girl is happy.

Also, girl.

So even happier.

Also, more girl.

Blather. Rinse. Repeat.

Become a power-producing dynamo based on feedback loop between happiness' and girlness' mutual resonance reinforcement effects.

Power small conglomeration of Southern Ontario cities with soft pink and pastel blue radiation pattern generated by DressGoSpinny.

#TransJoy #TransGEM

Following on from a thread that FinalGirl posted today, I wonder if there's a mechanism by which we could alert anti-racist people to the presence of racist remarks in the replies of people of colour?

With the goal that someone replies to the alart, saying "I've got this one." And then goes to the thread, replies to the racist, and untags the target of the racism?

Meaning...we who are white get to do some of the work of anti-racism, without lumbering our Black friends and siblings with the sole responsibility of fighting the racism they receive on a constant basis by themselves.

Does anyone have an idea for how we could arrange this? I'm wondering if a bot account could be set, which could be tagged by someone needing help, and propagate that notice to the volunteers?

Note I'm talking about single-person responses to each post. NOT dogpiling.

Just honest white anti-racist people, doing the donkey work of anti-racism, instead of leaving it to the targets all the time.

I'm very open to constructive suggestions on how this could be improved, or accomplished, in the best and most effective way to accomplish our goals: making Fedi a place where racism has consequences.

According to the people who face it daily, we aren't doing that well enough yet. For me, that puts the onus on US - white people - to get this shit rolling and do some fucking work.

I also, now I'm thinking about it, might put together an account specifically for posting a good Black author's book about the work needing done once a week, or maybe twice a week.

Post them, encourage reading, give some questions to get people started on approaching the book.

Because we, white people, MUST DO BETTER. We want Fediverse to be a place where everyone's welcome?

Then get to fucking work and make it happen.

There is one more thing. For my US friends.

The Constitution, to some extent, means something for only one reason: the people agree to it.

You know what legal laws are. And you know what illegal, immoral, unjust laws are. The time has come to stand up and make the Constitution mean what it says.

Make certain every birth is registered as a new US citizen. If the government won't do it...someone else get on it. How do you think the government got *started*?

They can't make the 14th Amendment not apply, if you the people refuse to let them do that.

We who are white have been complicit for too long. We need to start standing up for the principles, the morals, we profess: that we respect personal liberty, that we want equity AND equality, that we do not consent to those rights being withdrawn from *anyone* anymore.

We can assess our guilt each of us as people who've benefited from whiteness.

Later.

But first...start FIXING things. Guilt and feeling crappy can come later, and probably should.

The Canadian flag doesn't mean the same to me that it once did, since Reconciliation began, and I started facing what happened for me to live here now: that a few hundred years ago, I'd have been part of the group starting that horror in motion.

Not Indigenous peoples. Not migrants. Not citizens. Not Black citizens. Not any person should have their rights violated by the government *you* the people built.

The rebellion - it was better than a revolution, actually, revolutions are really, really dangerous and a lot of people get killed - it was the substitution of one government for another. No interregnum, as it were. A better one, hopefully.

It can be, but you have to believe it. And live it. And as a fellow once said, "Make it so."

#NoKings

There's still time. Even in the East. Get out there and be visible.

This will be the perfect on-ramp protest for you, if you've never done it before.

Get out and walk on YOUR streets for the first time, without permission. Get out and ignore traffic lights at YOUR street corners, without permission. Feel that power? Of loads and loads of people who agree with you generally?

That's the power of civil disobedience. You did that. How did it feel? Good? Then you did the protesting right. That's what it is. It's being willing to ignore a law that gets in the way of your ability to express your feelings about the government.

It's the small stuff, but just doing that single thing is more than many of you ever did before. You're good people. You wouldn't break the law.

Well, traffic laws, maybe, after all, they're not "crime", are they? They're "traffic offences" in your experience. Something you can laugh about with your friends.

So...if that resonated, you're white. Hi! It's you I want to talk to. I'm also very, very white. I'm English-born, Canadian-raised, white beefeating beef.

So I want to remind you that for many other people, doing what you're doing today is much more risky than for you. That's why you're needed. The more of you there are at the rally, the more the police will stay hands-off. That's how it works. The police are, basically, on the side of whiteness.

You can refuse to be, by going out to protests.

I've been an organiser for 33 years for queer rights. A lesson or two:

This is a great on-ramp, it's broad, safe, visible, and likely to be police-proof. Too many normie white people about. That's you.

So being out there is itself an act of resistance. It's saying, "not in my name, you aren't hurting these people here, today."

From there, it's a short emotional hop to understanding that's what other protesters are doing: following ICE, looking out for their neighbours.

"Not in my name, not here, not today."

G'luck.

@StillIRise1963

He's English. To the English, being banished from a damp island that has two seasons ("rainy" and "June 25") to a foreign place is, inexplicably, considered a Bad Thing.

They don't speak proper English, for a start, meaning you have to bother with that foreign jabber. And they can't do a decent beer outside England. And they're always putting gritty things on the veg that make it taste funny.

It's a bit mind-blowing, but it's kind of a national consensus?

I'm sure we'll have a few hearty souls who express their love of living overseas, but these are just iconoclasts, heretics, who value knowing another language and other frippery.

The rule in England when I was a kid was, "it's alright to speak a foreign language, but if you sound like a native doing it, we're going to burn your hotel down".

Which, y'know...they're keeping up the tradition, a rank few.

@GreenSkyOverMe

Yeah...I think it greatly unlikely that the Germans saw the invasion as secondary in any great way. They spent a HUGE amount of money building defences, and stationing hundreds of thousands of troops there. Every mark could have been used to feed a soldier at the Eastern Front, if the invasion wasn't a threat.

Definitely the Soviets did the majority of the brutal fighting. I'd never deny that. But to say the Germans were unaffected by the threat of invasion, let alone the reality of it, is...a little stronger than I'd call the consensus of historical opinion?

But reasonable people can differ. I appreciate your contirbution. :)

4/10

Right. Now forward to Russia, post-Soviet collapse. Putin eventually takes over, and in the service of his growing authoritarian regime, he builds up the myth of invincibility. Russia is destined to be an imperial superpower! Look how we threw back the invaders, twice, to their destruction!

So when Putin starts the open warfare in Ukraine (remembering he’d seized Crimea many years earlier, and the Little Green Men pseudo-invasion of the Donbas and Luhansk regions of Ukraine), he proclaimed that it would be done in three days. They put together a pretty slapdash plan, involving a push on two major fronts: one from Donbas/Luhansk, one towards Kyiv itself, including airborne troops landing at the airport to try and seize it.

Ukraine threw them back from there, pushed right back over the border near Kyiv, and eventually retaking Kharkiv and some other parts. Then the war ground to a more or less halt. The Russians couldn’t push forward any other way than slow, grinding assaults, pouring in men and machines as fast as they could to try and overwhelm the Ukrainian defence.

They managed to make slow, very slow, progress, until even that petered out. Three and a half years into the open phase of the war, they were stalled.

Which is when Ukraine got their strategy working for real.

They had been building up their ability to strike behind the Russian lines, while maintaining the front line as a stalemate. Supply lines were hit, reorg and rest areas were hit, railway lines, junctions, anything they could reach, to push the Russian supply lines to be longer. Frustrated by the restrictions on deep strikes by their weapons providers in the West, they began building their own deep strike assets.

5/10

And so the war continued, no movement at all on the front lines, just endless meat-assaults by the Russians that tried to overwhelm the local troop concentrations with sheer numbers of targets, thinking some of them surely had to get through and damage the defenders. Ukraine calmly defended, retreating when absolutely necessary, preserving their forces as much as possible.

The strikes behind the lines got farther and farther behind the lines. The supply lines for Russian were now becoming unwieldy. And where Putin had tried desperately to insulate the Russian public from the war, here it was showing up on their doorsteps. Closer and closer to the industrial heartland.

Then a shift: the Ukrainians start hitting oil infrastructure. This meant they’d knock down a refinery, then a different one hundreds of km away, forcing the Russian engineering repair teams to be constantly on the move, catching up with the ongoing damage by Ukrainian strikes.

Supplies for those repairs began to dwindle, as the sanctions bit harder. Slowly, the Russian capacity to refine oil began to collapse. Recently, as much as 40% of the refining capacity was offline at once. That has two effects on Russia.

1) They can't refine oil for the whole domestic economy as much as they need.

2) Since the Ukrainians were also hitting export facilities, they couldn't as easily sell their oil, the only real method they had left of bringing in currency they could buy sanctions-busting equipment with.

The war has been extremely expensive for Russia. It has nearly wiped out their foreign currency reserves (built up by Putin over several years), and they're now financing the war by selling "bonds" to Russian banks, which are not allowed to refuse to buy them.

These bonds are being priced right now at 16% interest and up. That's a HUGE number.

6/10

Okay. We're nearly there.

As the restrictions on deep strikes are loosened, Ukraine also strikes airfield after airfield, forcing the Russians to stage their aircraft further and further from the front lines. See what I mean about artificially extending Russia's supply lines?

With the reduced refining capacity, and the longer flights, the Russian air force is largely neutered at this poiint.

Also, importantly, gas shortages are now affecting the whole country, right back to the place they really didn't want them to affect: Moscow and Piter.

The Russian civilians are by now getting a taste of war on their doorstep, and they're not loving it. Maybe this Special Military Operation isn't quite as automatic a victory as they'd been told?

Putin ramps up oppression. Cuts down Internet access. Bans apps that aren't Russian-made. Some can still use them, but it's a big blow to public confidence.

It's still quiet on the home front, because Russia's regime is nothing if not brutal in its repression of dissent. But it's a different kind of quiet. A waiting quiet.

It's becoming harder and harder to find new bodies to feed into the grinder. Russia can no longer afford to offer huge signing bonuses (many of which never get paid, through bureaucratic dodges and such). Local police begin sweeping up anyone they can conceivably pin a petty crime on, the punishment for which is either Siberia or Ukraine.

Meanwhile, they've fully converted to a war economy. No civilian goods are being made, basically; all production goes to war materiel. A false dawn appears economically: the rise of military spending boosts a sick economy. But it's not productive spending: it's lliterally blowing your money up by the billions. Trillions in rubles.

The economy is falling apart. They can't cook the books anymore to hide it.