fuck every democrat who says the issue of trans rights is a “distraction.” fuck every single liberal who say that the threat of stripping every trans person of legal recognition is a red herring or a losing issue and if we focus on it too long we’ll throw the election. we’re talking about human rights, access to medical care, sex education, discrimination, citizenship, and a whole lot else, for millions of people.
trans people aren’t a “distraction.” we’re human beings. the fact that so many liberals turn their backs on trans people is fucking despicable.
Okay…but this, right here? This is exactly what the Republican party wants. Young voters turning against the Democratic party and either not voting at all, or voting in favor of some third party candidate that has literally zero chance of pulling in enough votes to win. They want division among the ranks. They want to split our vote.
In political terms, calling something a ‘distraction’ means it’s a distraction tactic, not that the issue itself isn’t important. The Republican party has a very longstanding history of dropping hints of major policy changes right before big elections in the hopes of getting the “hot-headed liberals” all fired up about it so we start bickering among ourselves. They deliberately drop issues that they know are hot-button topics because these are the topics that have the potential to be the most divisive.
They’re awful but they’re not dumb. They know trans rights is an issue that could potentially split the democratic vote. It’s an issue that’s very heavily weighted toward the younger side of the party, which again, was a deliberate move on their part. If they can convinced you that the “big bad Democrats don’t care about you little trans and nonbinary kids so why bother,” then they’ve effectively won the election in a walk because the democrats went in divided–again.
Look, the democratic party isn’t perfect. Not by a long shot. But it’s literally the only party that has a snowball’s chance in hell at overtaking the republican majority right now. If we as trans and nonbinary individuals ever want our identities respected and protected, it’s the only party that’s going to be able to get us there, because it’s the party going in the direction we need to go. If you want to vote in favor of our rights, then vote Democrat. No number of videos with pennies is going to change the fact that right now, in this political climate, third party candidates are not going to have enough power to effect the changes we want.
Warning against something being a distraction doesn’t mean “don’t look at it or worry about it,” it means, “hey, I know this is majorly upsetting, and absolutely something needs to be done, but don’t let it divide us.” It’s literally because the issue is so important that democrats are warning against it as a distraction tactic–if we want to prevent that kind of change from happening under republican rule, we have to keep our heads and not let them keep us from voting as a unified party.
Please don’t let the political rhetoric make you think that the democratic party isn’t going to be fighting for us and our rights. That’s kind of exactly what the Republican party wants you to think. It’s a division tactic. Don’t fall for it.
The Republican party has a very longstanding history of dropping hints of major policy changes right before big elections in the hopes of getting the “hot-headed liberals” all fired up about it so we start bickering among ourselves.
THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS
I’ve been voting since 1998. This is what they do every single election.
You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The Democratic candidates aren’t perfect. But they for damn sure are better than the crap the Republicans are putting on our plates.
This is not the election to hold out for purity. That’s what happened in 2016 and that’s what got us Trump and everything else bad that’s happened, and WILL HAPPEN if we don’t turn out the GOP in two weeks.
If you are 18+ and LGBT, GET OUT AND VOTE ON NOVEMBER 6TH. TRANSGENDER RIGHTS ARE IN DANGER.
The Trump Administration is planning to change the legal definition of sex to- “male or female, unchangeable, Unless by genetic testing.” Aka, trans people would be completely erased. They would have no rights towards discrimination, changing their gender, or even presenting as trans in general. If you aren’t planning to vote or you’re on the fence, PLEASE, for the love of god, get out and vote. We have to protect our community.
There are many different factors behind this crisis, but one
incontrovertible fact looms over every explanation: there isn’t anywhere
for homeless people to live, and housing is the most reliable solution to homelessness.
Accordingly, the city of San Francisco’s Prop C is proposing to tax its
giant, super-profitable, tax-avoiding tech companies (with gross
turnover exceeding $50m) to build housing for 4,000 homeless people.
While some tech companies (like Salesforce) have backed the measure,
Lyft and Stripe have made major contributions to fund the No-on-C
campaign being run by the Chamber of Commerce’s PAC.
Lyft’s CEO calls the company “woke” and it is often positioned as “fair
trade Uber,” an ethical alternative to the Ayn-Rand-inspired
performative cruelty of Uber and its management. But Lyft’s major
investor is the human monster and Trump ally Peter Thiel
who believes women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and thinks that
“democracy is incompatible with freedom,” and every dime Lyft makes
enriches Thiel and gives him more money to spend on achieving his
apocalyptic extremist agenda.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.
A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.
Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.
The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.
The Supreme Court has heard several cases about gerrymandering. The consensus is, basically, that political gerrymandering is okay (redistricting based on whether the house is Democratic or Republican), but racial gerrymandering is not okay – regardless of whether it’s meant to help or hinder minority voters. “Wait, help minority voters?” I hear you asking. Yup! Historically, some districts have been made all-black specifically because a racially-mixed district would never elect black politicians, and would essentially nullify the votes of any black voters. When the district was divided up for those reasons, a Republican majority has struck it down for being racist. But Hunt v. Cromartie (2000) says, basically, that if all the Democrats just happen to be black, then it’s okay, because it’s on political lines, not racial ones.
Okay, but that’s gerrymandering. What about other tactics to suppress your opponent’s vote that’s not gerrymandering?
The case quoted above is a case from 2016. After Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act that required some states to ask permission before changing their voting laws, North Carolina’s Republican government (including then-Governor Pat McCrory) basically set about undoing as many things that helped black voters as possible. Are there IDs that mostly black people use? They’re no longer valid. Do black people tend to both register and vote early? Eliminate early registration and early voting. Do black people tend to vote more on Sundays because of their church’s help (such as carpooling from the church parking lot)? Get rid of that, too!
And when asked about it, their justification is essentially the same as the one in Cromartie. “It’s not racist, it’s anti-Democrat. We’re just trying to keep Democrats from voting, and they just happen to be black!”
The Fourth Circuit (it never got to the Supreme Court, thank God) says, basically:
Your reasoning is bad and you should feel bad;
There’s no way you can justify this with “trying to stop the Democrats” when everything you got rid of was aimed at hurting the black vote;
Even if you were trying to stop the Democrats, having race as a factor at all lets us infer that you intended to be discriminatory;
Actually, wait, we don’t even have to infer it, because you fucking told us with your actual mouths that you intended to discriminate against black people, you literal dumbfucks.
I’m writing all this out partially because I’m a nerd who likes context, but also partially for this reason:
There is legal precedent that can, under certain circumstances, allow racially-biased voting laws so long as no one says they’re racially-biased. This is a major hurdle to pretty much any legal challenge to discriminatory voting laws.
Despite this, you can still take down those laws – it’s never impossible to overturn a bad law, even if there’s not a lot of evidence, though of course it’s easier if you have evidence that good on your side (THEY SAID IT. OUT LOUD. IN COURT).
A really good way to get rid of bad laws if you aren’t up to suing the government (though please, please, sue the government)? Fucking vote. The original omnibus law wouldn’t have been passed if Republicans weren’t in office.
US Senator David Purdue (R-GA/@sendavidperdue),
a grown-ass human being elected to high office in the most powerful
nation in the land, was asked a question about Brian Kemp, who is both a
(monumentally unhinged)
candidate for governor of Georgia and Georgia’s Secretary of State, in
charge of overseeing the election in which he is standing.
California is one of the hot-zones
in the world’s urban housing crisis, driven by a combination of
opposition to highrise/high-density living and the mass purchase of
foreclosed properties following the 2008 crisis by giant Wall Street
landlords who have steadily ratcheted up rents
and evictions in a big to safeguard the flow of payments to bondholders
who get a share of the rents extracted from struggling tenants living
in dangerous, substanding housing.
California’s cities have different policy levers they can yank on to
address this: zoning changes, commuter rail, school spending. But one
lever that cities have relied upon since the beginning of modern urban
government is missing: rent control. California state law forbids rent
control on single-family homes; and apartments build after 1995.
A ballot measure, Prop 10, will allow cities to impose rent controls on
all rental stock, allowing voters a say in the way that their cities are
developed. But the giant hedge funds that own hundreds of thousands of
California rental properties are pumping millions more into
scare-campaigns intended to convince voters to oppose Prop 10.
Blackstone, the largest private equity firm in the world, is
California’s biggest corporate landlord, with 127,000 single-family
homes in its “portfolio.” They’re responsible for $6,859,747 in
anti-Prop-10 spending, part of the $45m attack on the proposition.
Landlords across California have sent eviction notices to their tenants
giving them 60 days to leave; other have announced massive rent
increases – and tenants have been notified that these will be cancelled
only if Prop 10 fails.
“Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s ® office is blocking 53,000 people from registering to vote, according to records obtained by the Associated Press, a huge number that could sway his gubernatorial race against Democrat Stacey Abrams. As TPM laid out this morning, Kemp has used a controversial “exact match” program to approve or block voter registrations that disproportionately impacts minority voters. Now we know exactly how many people that might affect this election. According to the AP, fully 70 percent of the voter applications that are being held up by Kemp’s office are from black people.”
