Abortion is a trans rights issue, and trans rights are reproductive rights

So memorably (to me anyway) I once gave a speech at a small but influential gathering in defense of the Lovejoy Surgicenter clinic in Portland, Oregon. The so-called “Lovejoy clinic” provided abortions to women and others in need for fifty goddamn years, starting before Roe guaranteed abortion rights at the federal level. It was not a Planned Parenthood clinic, though it did frequently work closely with Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette. This did not happen without attacks and certainly not without protest. So you can imagine that supportive rallies were needed there on many occasions.

At the rally I attended, and where I spoke, a number of people from the board of PP-CW and the Lovejoy clinic and Oregon NARAL also attended, and they were listening. I briefly spoke about the state of trans freedom and trans health care and the political attacks on both. Few people if anyone seemed aware of any of this, but that was kinda my point. I said that the attempt to assert public control over individuals’ genitals and health care and especially health care having anything to do with genitals was all of a piece. For that reason, I argued, trans people must stand up and count themselves among the fighters for abortion rights whether or not we are people who are able to become pregnant. After the rally I was approached by a number of heavy hitters in Oregon’s reproductive rights community and we spoke for maybe an hour, certainly much longer than I had planned to be at the rally. I remember being quite late to get home.

Within two years support for abortion rights among trans people in Portland had increased and PPCW had begun providing a small amount of trans health care. Now, I have no idea whether or not showing up that day had anything to do with the beginning of PPCW’s slow shift into providing more and more care to trans patients. And if I affected the trans community’s willingness to take on abortion access as a trans issue it was more from general haranguing over years in personal conversations than it was that rally where few if any other trans people joined up and no others spoke. But it’s clear that something was happening around then, and that I was a part of it, and that a community was opening up that had felt besieged and often had little time for issues like anti-domestic violence or reproductive rights work that didn’t seem to fit into the narrow definition of trans issues that then existed.

And look, if you don’t know what it’s like to be besieged, just try being an out trans person thirty years ago, whoo, sibling.

The point of all this is that there’s a right way and a wrong way to expand your issues. When you see your issues linked with issues that are historically not your issues a good approach to this might be to say, “Hey, I notice this link, and because I care about my issues, I care about yours.” This is not only good ally work, but it also can be the start of something special, as in Portland 25 years ago where we went further. As trans people and people fighting for reproductive rights, we held hands like Marcie and goddamned Peppermint Patty and told each other, “Because I care about my issues, your issues are my issues.” Trans people gave more money to reproductive rights organizations than they had previously and out trans people began working in reproductive rights organizations. At the same time reproductive rights organizations started offering care to trans people right there in their clinics.

It was a beautiful thing to witness (and none of my doing, since I did not work in those organizations and I have never provided abortions or trans health care or health care of any kind besides bandaids and such for kids) and I will always love Portland for it.

More often though, we fall short of that. Humans gonna human, right? I have limits on my expertise and I can’t always talk about Black women, chemical hair straighteners, racism, and cancer (though that’s an article I’ve been wanting to write for two weeks now) because white MtF person touching on Black women’s hair? That can get tangled and uncomfortable real quick, and as necessary as it is that white people talk about how racism is giving Black women cancer, it’s not entirely unreasonable to be afraid of fucking up on the topic and that can make writing about it a little more fraught, a little more draining, and a little more time consuming than writing about other topics. We’re human, and this is mostly okay.

But mostly okay is not ALL okay. When we get complacent, or when we seem to get complacent, it becomes necessary for one asshole to speak up and ask if we’re really doing our best here. It doesn’t feel great, usually, but it’s often necessary for the overall effort of getting better over time.

It is in this spirit that I’m gonna take some shots at Christina Cauterucci’s recent Slate article Abortion Is So Popular Republicans Are Inventing Conspiracy Theories to Trick Americans Into Voting Against It. Since this article appeared on Slate and was linked in the Wonkette TABS! roundup, I am sure all good liberals have read it. And if you know it then you know that a huge part of it is summed up here:

Abortion bans are unpopular. So unpopular that Republican extremists seem to have to invent conspiracy theories to trick Americans into voting for them.

That’s the major takeaway from recent political battles in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In all three states, abortion-related ballot initiatives and elections were framed by right-wing groups as the only thing standing between parents and “trans ideology” in the classroom. …

This is the new playbook. Using the specter of child corruption and social contagion, Republicans are attempting to manipulate parents, scapegoat trans and queer people, and erode multiple axes of bodily autonomy, all in one fell swoop.

Cauterucci brings the receipts. The article is, indeed a great summation of “the new playbook”.

What it is not, however, is any kind of call for trans advocates and feminist reproductive rights advocates to work together. The existence of trans people is portrayed as a chink in abortion defenders’ armour:

These groups believe that by agitating conservatives and uniting voters against a trans boogeyman, they can get people to ignore their own support for (or indifference to) abortion rights and eagerly line up to give those rights away.

And sure, we are that I guess. Cauterucci quotes a Republican scare-ad saying that we are

Malicious entities from out of state [that] are arriving in sheep’s clothing to “encourage sex changes for kids” and sneak “trans ideology” into schoolrooms

Fortunately Cauterucci has a more reassuring message. In her telling, cissexist scaremongering and the demonization of trans people is bad, but it’s also nothing to worry about:

It’s no surprise that GOP operatives are trying to divert the focus to literally any other issue where they perceive themselves to have the upper hand, though it is horrifying to see that they believe virulent transphobia is a winning enough position that it may convince voters to sign away their access to legal abortion. The only silver lining, in Ohio as in Wisconsin as in Michigan, is that the bait-and-switch doesn’t seem to be working.

In this article trans people aren’t the enemy. Instead, trans people are the helpless tools of the enemy. But we can be hopeful because trans people’s issues aren’t our issues, they are “other issues” and no one thinks that they’re protecting trans people when they vote for reproductive freedom.

And again, because I’m about to be THAT ASSHOLE, this is an article written by Cauterucci, not Cauterucci’s whole life and philosophy. For all I know, Cauterucci is trans. And lord knows I’ve had a piece or two of my own edited to say something that I didn’t want the piece to say, so let’s get together and agree here that no one is interested in demonizing Cauterucci.

And also, too, there’s room in the wide world for some articles that are single-issue. It’s popular to say in trendy living rooms within a ten foot radius of my fat ass that my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit, but sometimes the question for the day really is nothing more than, “What is the current GOP strategy?” with no room for any sidetracks into whether it’s good or bad or how best to fight it.

And, of course, we’re human beings with limited space in a brains and in our hearts for all the issues that matter. If you’re doing your best and you just don’t get trans issues and don’t have room in your whatever for trans people or trans advocacy, I would much rather you embrace and create positive momentum towards resolution on issues you do have the time and energy to address, whether that’s climate change or voting rights or abortion, than give up on everything because it’s not in you to do something intersectionally.

But there is a problem if pieces like’s Cauterucci’s work for Slate become common, and in my opinion they have become common enough to reach this threshold. However much you would like to give zero points to the theocratic right on any and every question, they’re not actually wrong to think that trans rights and reproductive rights are related. In many cases this is direct and explicit: governments often have and often still do require proof of sterilization before changes to legal sex can be made. FtM people can and do get pregnant, can and do access abortion. Trans people of all flavours use condoms and lube and antibiotics for our STDs. In other cases, it is more indirect. Indeed whether you believe (as I do and any reasonable person does) that the political right’s attacks on trans people during recent reproductive rights ballot campaigns have been deceptive to mendacious red herrings and demonization, it is certainly true that the theocrats are creating ever more links between the issues.

I said 25 years ago in that after-demo discussion that the desire to control others’ reproductive systems is related in the theocrats’ own minds, and if I tolerate fascistic reproductive control so long as there’s a special exception for me, I am tolerating the existence of an ideology that would destroy me the moment it had the chance. This is equally true for trans people who tolerate anti-abortion attacks and for reproductive rights advocates who tolerate anti-trans attacks.

I said at the time that I fight for reproductive rights for many reasons, but not least because it is in my enlightened self-interest. And so it is for people whose primary issue is reproductive rights: if the general lefty public went all in on fighting for trans rights thirty years ago, could the theocrats use trans people as a wedge to split (or threaten to split) support for abortion rights today? Well, of course not.

So it pains me to see the mistakes born of near-universal ignorance repeated in a time of near-universal access to information about trans lives. Take the passage in Cauterucci’s article that addresses the 2022 campaign for a reproductive rights amendment in Michigan. The amendment found in Michigan Proposal 3 read, in part:

Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.

The right wing opponents were going to try to make this about trans people, and the most convenient portion of the amendment for their purposes was the right to make decisions related to “sterilization”. Cauterucci explains:

Conservatives spent the months before the election trying to convince voters that the inclusion of the term “sterilization” was a sneaky admission, by Democrats, that they would be legalizing secret gender-affirming surgeries for children.

Now, Proposal 3 was not a secret effort to hack up children’s bodies, much less an admission of our dastardly plan to do so. Cauterucci goes on to explain that at some length, citing the fact that puberty blockers do not cause sterilization and that

[l]egal analysts who responded in the Detroit Free Press said the abortion rights amendment in Michigan was not written to legalize clandestine procedures for children, nor could it be reasonably interpreted as such by a judge.

None of this is wrong, of course, but there’s a really odd element to all this. Cauterucci quotes a theocratic opponent of human rights thus:

“A constitutional right to ‘sterilization’ surely includes a right to be sterilized to align one’s sex and gender identity,” wrote a spokesperson for Citizens to Support MI Women & Children, the PAC that funded the ads, in an email to the Detroit Free Press. “The majority of voters do not support a 12-year-old girl’s right to sterilization without her parent’s notice or consent.”

And while she does an admirable job attacking scaremongering about trans kids getting access to surgery without parental notice or consent, never once does her piece even acknowledge, much less find importance in, the fact that the first part of this terrible statement is actually correct: sterilization is a normal and expected result for most gender confirmation surgeries that alter the reproductive organs. Thus Michigan’s Proposal 3 is a constitutional amendment with provisions of special importance to trans people.

Now as I said, not every piece of journalism needs be intersectional, but Cauterucci in this piece does everything possible to convince readers that trans lives have nothing at all to do with reproductive rights and there is nothing related to trans persons or trans health care on the ballot in the measures the article analyzes. Sure, the focus is on countering myths about trans health care for children, but when the quotes an author brings in explicitly raise a valid connection (trans people have a health care interest in a right to sterilization), it is up to the author to address that. By remaining silent on the issue Cauterucci gives the impression of believing that not only is the connection to trans children scare mongering that should not (and did not) prevent people from voting for reproductive rights, but also that any connection to trans adults is illusory. As a result, trans people are being given the impression (rightly or wrongly) that we are unimportant to Cauterucci and her fellow travellers, at least in a reproductive rights context, beyond the extent to which we are useful weapons of the Right.

This is, of course, wrong. I was denied health care in the early 90s specifically because the treatment path I sought included surgical removal of the gonads, and doctors wanted to prevent me from “suffering” sterilization. Nor was I alone in that experience. Other trans people around the world in cultures as disparate as Iran and Sweden have been forced or coerced into sterilization by government law or policy. The trans struggle for the right to self-determination on health care which includes sterilization (even when that is not the primary goal) has been waged for decades.

The inclusion of sterilization in Michigan’s Proposal 3 was therefore a huge win for trans people who had been both denied sterilizing procedures and forcibly sterilized. (It was also, by the by, a huge win for black women, women with certain disabilities, and poor women on government assistance because all of these are groups that have been targeted for sterilization without consent throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.) While the Proposal 3 vote had concluded before Cauterucci began writing the article, it is an odd choice to omit any notion that the much-contested sterilization right might have been a point of attack for the theocrats, but it also served as an opportunity for diversifying and expanding support among people with disabilities, poor people, trans people, and Black women.

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that trans people and trans advocates being spoken of as if an irrelevant distraction to issues of reproductive rights rather than a vital constituency and natural coalition partners was not accidental. This was almost certainly an intentional framing for this article (possibly by Cauterucci, possibly by an editor). And to my dismay, this is far from the only article to be written in such a way. Cauterucci’s piece is not uniquely guilty, but it was reading it that it become clear that now is time to push back.

If you are a reproductive rights advocate, I want to first say thank you. But then I want to tell you that it’s fucking time you stood up (if you haven’t been already and for years the way Planned Parenthood Columiba Willamette has been) and interrupted the framing that portrays trans rights and abortion rights as separate issues unfortunately and erroneously connected only by the actions of a mendacious and theocratic right wing.

If nothing else, do it for your own fucking self-interest. If trans people weren’t societies’ demons, then the existence of trans people and the protection of trans rights could not be used against the efforts to protect reproductive rights. If our demonic status didn’t make letters about us such good fundraising material, the enemies of reproductive rights would have less cash on hand with which to work mischief. And while trans people are society’s demons, we are also natural allies you should be targeting for recruitment. You should be aware of how the fight for the right to self-determine access to sterilizing or potentially sterilizing health care gives racial justice advocates, disability rights advocates, economic justice advocates and, yes, trans advocates a huge stake in this fight. It motivates us. It causes us to join with people that have not been historically welcoming of us prior to the 1990s and in many areas are still not. You should know how to rally your allies, to bring people together, to forge a movement. You should know this even if you don’t actually give a fuck about trans people or Black women or folks with Down Syndrome. You should know this because it will make you more successful in fighting for the cause you hold most dear to your own heart.

But I’m hoping that at least some of you will challenge articles like this one in Slate because my issues are your issues. I would like you to see that Cauterucci’s attempt to divorce trans rights from reproductive rights bisects actual human beings, people you care about, people you might even love if you got to know them.

Abortion is a trans rights issue. Trans rights are reproductive rights. Just because people who lie about adolescent trans health care say that our issues are linked doesn’t actually mean that they aren’t. Nor do we suddenly have to avert our eyes from our common interests.

So when you’re speaking or writing about reproductive rights, don’t use the framing that trans rights aren’t reproductive rights. Don’t let the trans people unafraid to be associated with baby killers be braver than reproductive rights advocates that risk being associated with child molesting mutilators. We can counter the harmful myths about child predation without throwing each other out of our purer organizations.

In short: be my goddamned Peppermint Patty and I will be your Marcie and the world can be a whole lot better than if we each ignore the other’s issues as irrelevant distractions from our own, at best worthy but unrelated causes wrongfully conflated by the Right and at worst frustrating vulnerabilities which we must disavow, even excise from our movement.

We’re in this together. Let’s act like it.

Defund the Police: Guy Fawkes Eve

It grates on me every time we (once again) have a conversation about “Defund the Police”. Many would criticize it as a bit of rhetoric for its use of the word “Defund” which can mean “reduce funding somewhat” or “eliminate all funding”, rather like “Slash taxes!” might. Part of why it grates on me is that I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to this argument, but (and this is a huge but) I’m not a rhetorician and I’m certainly not a sloganeer.

It may have come to the attention of one or both my readers that I’m actually somewhat longwinded at times. It turns out that this is a general trend for me. I fear speaking with insufficient precision for a number of reasons and my response is (often) to strive for hyperclarity, heedless of the prolix risks and results. As the Emperor of Austria might say, “Too many words.”

But it so happens that I have a modicum of self-awareness. While I can’t actually stop myself from writing a thousand word answer to a four word question, I can actually stop myself from writing slogans. I’m not good at them. I’m never going to be good at them. I’m content to have (and develop) other skills without ever shooting for a career in ad copy, headline writing, or sloganeering. I will always be uncomfortable with ACAB despite being fully aware that there’s some important truth there. Likewise I will always be uncomfortable with Defund the Police! It’s who I am.

So why is it grating to hear criticism of a slogan with which I, myself, am uncomfortable? Because the criticisms so often focus on exactly the subjects that I get wrong, time and again. A slogan doesn’t need to be precise or even accurate to have emotional resonance. Hey, Kool-Aid!, Where’s the beef?, and Can you hear me now? were all wildly successful slogans without being either precise or accurate about, well, anything at all. One might reasonably say, “Hey! Kool-aid sucks. Don’t bring that shit around here.” “Where’s the beef?” is a seemingly stupid question when the beef is easily found in the hamburgers of Wendy’s competitors. And, “Can you hear me now?” could be easily answered, “No, your network sucks,” as it was among people I knew at the time. The most recent slogan to hit the news is perhaps the best proof that slogans can seem to fail every intellectual test and still work: “Let’s go, Brandon!” is neither precise, nor accurate, nor intended to convey anything at all an encouragement to someone named Brandon. The follow-on, “Let’s go, Darwin!” that has gotten less press but is used against anti-vaxxers makes, if anything, even less sense. Darwin never encouraged people to die sooner for the sake of anything, much less evolution specifically.

So when people criticize Defund the police! for the trente-sixième time using the arguments that appeal not to the best in my, but to my areas of least competence, and they do so on the basis of premises that are easily proven wrong (e.g. slogans must be precise and accurate!) it annoys me because the people making those criticisms are inviting me to fall into the same pit in which I’ve landed thirty five times before. I know this doesn’t get us anywhere because I’ve made the same mistake myself, and I don’t appreciate being pushed toward making the same mistake again.

Defund the police! works as a slogan. We know that, empirically. This isn’t a question of ad executives sitting around a board room table discussing whether or not Where’s the beef? is sufficiently precise or accurate. We have real world data. Defund the police! makes right wing defenders of the police state nervous and puts them on the defensive. On the other hand, Defund the police! is a cry that large numbers of left wing critics of the police state voluntarily take up, propagate, and organize around.

These are exactly the qualities you want in a successful anti-police state slogan. It actually does (contrary to the comment of tallgrass05 in the thread which sparked this post) play offense instead of defense. Many critics of the slogan claim that they want to do exactly this, and yet fail to understand that we couldn’t get our policy proposals a media hearing until Defund the police! caused the news media to perform interviews and create stories specifically to answer the question, “What does Defund the police! really mean in practice?”

In short, the pithy people responsible for Defund the police! are actually the ones who have created the opportunity for me to wax with poetical prolixiferousization.

Given the opportunity, I’m going to take it by posting (with minimal reframing) some of the writing I’ve done on “abolishing police” and “defunding police” in comments elsewhere on FtB so that they can be found in one place for future reference and present discussion. But while taking that opportunity, it would be rude of me to be anything less than grateful towards those who provided it.

Thank you, creators of Defund the police! You’ve created a better slogan to fight the US police state than any in recent memory.

Critical Race Theory: Videos by people much more fun than me

For our next fun & games with CRT, I’m just going to share two good videos. One is very non technical while still getting most everything right. I like it a lot. Whatever quibbles I have with it I’m not going to bother with because right now I just want you to hear something from a lay person about CRT because hopefully whatever language they use will be more accessible and less wordy than whatever I would say. (Yes, I’ve heard myself speak. Can’t really help it. Sorry/not sorry.) This first, non technical video was actually suggested in the comments so if you’ve been following along in the comments, you might have already watched it. If you haven’t though, your narrator and host goes by the handle T1J and is excellent. Get to it:

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An Open Letter To My Wonkette Friends Who Are Busy Not Commenting

Okay, I saw the thing about Marcotte and Imma let you finish, but before I do, I’m gonna tell you a story that I told you before but what you did not seem to listen. If you did not see that, it’s about Marcotte using her angry voice about Democrats not doing shit and about other people using their angry voice to tell Marcotte how wrong she is to get angry about Democrats not doing shit.

In the 90s during my wild, Riot Grrl days when I was pro peace, pro titties, anti fascist and committed to a positive revolution of love and generosity (so, like today, but prettier & under 25), I was part of the Lesbian Avengers. We marched. We ate fire. We paired up, fucked each other for a week, then broke up & fucked someone else in the group. It was a whole thing.

Well, at the time there was that first out lesbian in the Oregon state legislature Gail Shibley (I still have her campaign button “Girlfriends for Gail!” on a dresser about 10 feet from me as I type) making waves. (The first out bisexual legislator, an obscure 1990s local politician named “Kate Brown” came out just after Gail, but this story is not about her.)

But things were not all puppies & kittens & oral sex & queer women writing your laws for you. There were also asshats, and they were, frankly, greater in number at the time. The hub of all asshat anti puppies/kittens/oral sex activity was the Oregon Citizens Alliance, but there were others, too. Some of them even in the legislature.

Well, artificial insemination hadn’t been invented that long before and the laws around it were still … interesting (as, frankly, they probably are today). One law that was important at the time said that any child of a legal wife was also the legal responsibility of the husband unless & until evidence came to light that it was not his child. Because of this legal “rebuttable presumption” dads might sometimes have to pay child support for a kid that wasn’t theirs after a divorce, but the law was clear that the interest of the child who had no choice to be born was more important than the interest of a man who at least had the choice of whom he wanted to trust in legal marriage.

But what about test tube babies? It’s obvious that at least sometimes artificial insemination would be used to get around male infertility, so what would it mean if a court found that there was no genetic relationship between a birthmother’s husband and her child? Would that really mean that a guy who supported artificial insemination shouldn’t pay to support the child he nontraditionally helped to create?

The solution in Oregon law was neither to abandon the rebuttable presumption standard which still had its uses nor to require support for all child conceived through ART. Instead the law required that a doctor providing services to a married woman seeking ART help in conceiving a child had to solicit and receive written consent from both the patient and the legal husband. In this way the courts could later feel comfortable imposing child support obligations on future divorcee dads.

But OCA fan, state legislator, and full time asswanker Kevin Mannix ignored the history and context of Won’t Somebody Think of The Children, and instead framed the issue this way:

Married women have to get permission from their husbands before receiving ART services, but single women (read: lesbians) don’t have to ask anybody (read: any man).*

So in keeping with the Republican philosophy of freedom for all, he proposed a law that would require a single woman seeking ART to petition the state for permission before services could begin.

Gail Shibley was having none of it. She went around to everyone she could & tried to kill this stupid bill but the men dominating the Oregon legs were having none of it. Mannix’s bill was going to get its committee hearing and serious consideration and might even become law.

Now Shibley was a privileged lawyer working inside the system. She trusted the Oregon lege to do the right thing, yet there was this obviously badstupid bill that was just embarrassingly sexist as fuck, and no one was listening to her. They were yelling “SHIBLEY IS BIASSS” throughout the statehouse because as a lesbian how could she objectively consider the reasonableness of the state telling women they have no sexual freedom? And not just Republicans, but Democrats, too. She was a total insider, except for that “woman who prefers her oral sex sans penis” thing, and yet she suddenly found herself with no credibility to engage her fellow legislators when she needed it most. As Shibley put it at the time,

They thought I was the far left fringe*

Well, the Lesbian Avengers were ready to do something about that. We gathered in secret at our regularly scheduled, publicly advertised Tuesday night meeting at the bookstore and put it to a vote:

Shall we show those fuckers who owns the “Far Left Fringe” title in this state?**

Answer: We shall! So we organized the fuck out of a protest & went to the statehouse screaming,

2 4 6 8 It’s all right to inseminate
1 3 5 7 FUCK YOU AND YOUR BILL, KEVIN!**

My housemate’s infant daughter was alternately in the stroller & hugging some lesbo’s breast throughout. We were allowed to march around the grounds a little (save little tyke, who was pushed or carried the whole time, the slacker) and then asked to leave, which we did.

But, AND HERE’S THE POINT:

A week or two later the story was out that the bill had been tabled in committee, would not get a hearing & would not become law. Gail Shibley herself told local reporters that no one had been listening to her before the Avengers protest, but after the protest other legislators came to her & told her that they were sorry for treating her like the lunatic fringe, that now that the Lesbian Avengers stormed the capital (legally! politely, even, so long as you weren’t a common Kevin Mannix! With no gallows or guillotine in evidence!) they knew who the lunatic fringe really was and it was not Gail, so they were now willing to listen.

Okay, ready for the big finish?
In the end what defeated Republican asshats wasn’t patient exploitation of the process and using a reasonable voice while paying attention to the context. AND it wasn’t a 7 month old sleeping through angry queer women screaming “FUCK YOU AND YOUR BILL, KEVIN!” It was, and your mind may be blown here, it was both of them together.

Screaming our lesbo chants wouldn’t have worked without someone on the inside making arguments on the inside that the legislative insiders could understand and respect. But making those reasoned arguments wasn’t going anywhere without radical outsiders demanding action.

IT TAKES BOTH, MOTHERWONKERS.

Please can we stop it with the anti Marcotte hatred and hatred for other people who commit other sins like demanding action and being tired of using “hate” as a noun?

And can we please stop it with the the hatred of people who prefer to act nicely middle class and pale and reasoned and logical and contextual and historical and all tolerant of the confident insider patience that appears to people suffering to be indifference to that suffering?

Yes, choosing one tactic over the other is fine. Yes, you can advocate for your preferred tactics over some other tactics. But in the end, my screaming at La Migra’s swat team snatching people off the street with my snatch juice stained lips is neither more nor less necessary than Chuck Schumer’s brunch with some Republican hack.

Argue passionately for what you think will make this world a better place. I certainly do. But don’t ever lose sight of the fact that in this world of very different people, your tactics aren’t the best tactics for every single advocate with different skills or a different audience, and even if they were the very bestest of best tactics you would still need someone wild and crazy like me to make your reason seem all that much more reasonable by contrast. And I will still need the insider to patiently work through the issues of centrist waffletwats.

We absolutely fucking require both Lesbian Avengers and Gail Shibleys in this world if we’re going to drag it kicking & screaming into a better place.

Please, denizens of Wonkette, please: disagree if you like, but never lose sight of the fact that we need each other, and we’re all doing the best we goddamned can.

==========================================
*may be a paraphrase, it’s been 25 years for fuck’s sake

**definitely not a paraphrase. We fucking OWNED left wing crazy in the 1990s, and I will never forget that chant. (Nor will I forget the Christmas Carol we wrote for our lesbian caroling action, “Betsy the bi gal”. That song rocked.)

QAnon, self parody on steroids

So, apparently Q has gone quiet since not long after last November’s US election. As a result there is a power vacuum, or perhaps “influence” vacuum, since QAnon isn’t precisely a hierarchical movement where anyone is overtly or specifically empowered to order others to take action. Whether in practice people have sufficient influence to declare an action needs to be taken and can expect that QAnons, at least some of them, will take that action is a separate question. (And I think the answer to that question is yes.) But call it power or influence, the vacuum exists, and there are many people who covet that power/influence and will pursue it.

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One night in Cancun

As both of my readers know, I am fond, on occasion, of rewriting the lyrics of my artistic betters. I do not usually rewrite them in timely or topical ways, but on this evening, in the space below a Wonkette article where no comments exist, some non-comments encouraged me to have a go at Ted Cruz to the tune of a largely forgotten 80s song from the musical Chess. Given it’s topical nature, if anyone who knows how to Twitter or Instabook wants to send this out, please tag Beto O’Rourke & Ted himself. I’d just be tickled to see what Beto’s reaction is, if any. Ted will ignore it publicly, of course, but I won’t mind pondering his displeasure in the absence of any overt response.

The original is “One Night in Bangkok,” but obviously that must change. (I will post a youtube link to the original for those unfamiliar with it, but it will follow my corrupted lyrics.)

And so to Harris County where we lay our scene…

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Seth Abramson Makes the Case For Charging Trump With Sedition

Seth Abramson analyzes Trump’s January 6th rhetoric in a thread that deserves wider exposure. As does his subsequent thread analyzing the speeches at Trump’s rally that immediately preceded his. Here’s the link to his analysis of Trump’s own words:

 

And here’s the link to the analysis of the speakers before him and the context that they create for understanding Trump’s speech:

 

This next quote is a particularly telling bit, but all of it is worthwhile. (I just wish he’d written the thing outside of twitter & linked it.) Read this:

 

There’s lots more. I’m not sure that 100k people actually attended the rally (others put the number at 30k or thereabouts), but besides using the larger end of crowd estimates, what he’s saying makes a reasonable case that this was knowing, willful incitement on the part of multiple speakers, including both Trump and is son.

Absolutely Nothing Nazi-Adjacent Here, Move Along

Or, you know, the opposite of that. The Proud Boys of North Carolina turned out to support a #StopTheSteal rally organized around the Governor’s mansion in Raleigh. Someone named Joshua Flores, who is clearly delusional about the presidential election result, organized the event and invited the Proud Boys as his “private security”. But when the event started they seemed less auxiliaries there to ensure the peace and more like people who want the other thing:

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Axios buys my premise

Earlier today I wrote about Trump’s capacity to destroy the Republicans from within just by remaining active in the party and doing what he do.

Of course, an important premise of that piece was that Trump could and would remain a powerful player, in my mind, the frontrunner, for the 2024 GOP nomination. KG called out that premise in the comments:

I think Trump is going to be fully occupied trying to stay out of prison.

While I take KG’s point, it wasn’t something I hadn’t thought about. It was merely something I had thought about but chose not to include any analysis on within that piece.

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