#anti-trans-eo — Public Fediverse posts

Mark me down as scared and ANGRY.

Well. It’s been one week of Trump’s 2nd term, and what a week it has been. I ended up being off of work due to extreme winter weather in Florida (my university got 9 inches, further in the panhandle got 9.5 inches, obliterating the record of 4 inches from 1954, climate change is real). I spent the entire week in sort of a terrified fugue state, unable to look away from the horrors unfolding from the President’s office. I couldn’t look away from the news feeds, and I couldn’t think much either. I went back to work today and had to concentrate on my job, so hopefully have broken out of that state. But the fear and uncertainty remains.

Tonight I attended a meeting of a local trans social group I go to sometimes. For tonight they had brought in a few people with messages of hope, including a local trans civil rights lawyer who has been fighting Florida’s anti-trans laws (and winning!) for the past few years. She had some good insights about how we shouldn’t panic because none of the EO is enforceable immediately, and it’s all very in line with what we’ve already seen here in FL, so we know how to deal with it. It was reassuring to have people on our side fighting for our rights in court-houses and the state-house. I’m trying to be both realistic about current events, and hold onto hope that things will get better again, and we will survive this too.

I’m also watching and worrying about the anti-disability actions taken this past week, from freezing health agency communications to targeting of disability benefits and much more. There’s been tales of life-saving medications drastically rising in price, cutting off spending at the NIH, including for the hospital, and more knock on effects that are going to get disabled folks killed. Not to mention, we still have Covid and now bird-flu and norovirus to contend with, and no public health news can get out to us. It’s a scary time right now, and I’m worried for myself and all my many disabled friends.

But I’m also angry. I will not be driven into the closet or go quietly to an end caused by greed and manufactured shortages. I will remain out, I will remain loud, and I will keep trying to build community and contribute to community safety nets, like the Pride center and the Civic Media Center and Food Not Bombs. I will continue to do my best at connecting people with information about everything, including things this administration has decided must be suppressed. And most of all, I will continue to find joy in things large and small, in my gender, in my friends and family in all their queer glory and nonconforming beauty, in libraries and archives, and in so much more. No matter how hard the Trumpers try, they can’t take who I am away from me. I will survive this, and I’m bringing as many of you along as I can for the journey of survival. To that end, have some recent photos of my cats being loving and my dog being loved by Binghe. Binghe, Yuan, and Bella all want you to be well and survive so you can thrive. They believe in all of us.

#antiTransEO #cats #censorship #disability #dog #hopePosting #lgbtq #politics #queer #transgender #transphobia