–Member of the Jaguars Eating People’s Faces Party. (warning: autoplay)
I have another migraine.
-Shiv
Against the Grain
How many intersections can you cram in one feminist?
–Member of the Jaguars Eating People’s Faces Party. (warning: autoplay)
I have another migraine.
-Shiv
Covering this presents a challenge, dear readers, because I cannot possibly scrape deep enough into the lexicon of my loathing to adequately capture my response. If you could connect to my brain directly, it would simply be white hot pain manifesting behind your eyeballs with a backdrop of millions of fingernails dragged across millions of blackboards amplified through a megaphone.
What makes this different is that it isn’t merely the standard legislative process being used to beat queer and trans people into oblivion. This is a special kind of psychopathy, the kind that could only be treated with the judicious application of an aluminum baseball bat.
To recap, Governor Roy Cooper campaigned on a promise to repeal HB2, citing the law’s punitive nature against trans folk simply for existing as well as the implications for discrimination against cisgender gay folks. Despite the fact that North Carolina seems to have voted for Cooper at least in part on his promise to do this (despite the dirty dealing and breathless histrionics we could only expect of a party so unprincipled they couldn’t find the backbone to do anything about Cheetolini), North Carolinian Republicans have decided that they know better than their own electorate.
In an apparent deal to see HB2 repealed, Cooper coordinated with the city Charlotte to see its nondiscrimination ordinances, which included protections for trans folk, repealed. Shortly after Charlotte foolishly expected honour from the same party that just foisted a god damn serial rapist into the White House, a special session was called to repeal HB2.
Except that HB2 wasn’t fucking repealed.
The bill they’ve filed (SB4) does repeal HB2, including its restrictions mandating what bathrooms transgender people may use. However, it also creates a “Six-Month Cooling-Off Period,” in which no municipality in the state may pass any laws related to employment or public accommodations, specifically noting “access to restrooms, showers, or changing facilities.”
Meaning even if HB2 is finally put to death like the savage fucking mistake that it is, its consequences would persist for another six months. Then, North Carolinian Democrats, having said “wait a second, that’s not part of the deal,” torpedoed SB4. Meaning HB2 is still alive, if in spastic death throes.
Then these same fucking twits tried to set up Cooper for not adhering to his campaign promises!
So twice before the election Roy Cooper kills a repeal/Repeal Deal. Now after being against a repeal deal, after the election he was for it. Now he is against it again because the repeal simply has teeth, to make sure our “long national Nightmare is over.”
It is clear Coopers only motivation here is political, first last and always. And the people of North Carolina who support repeal should know Cooper sold them down the river with a wink and a nod, to radical leftists who were waiting for the repeal and start this destructive fight all over.
YOU CHRONICALLY DISHONEST SACK OF SHIT. COOPER SUPPORTED A FULL REPEAL, NOT THE BULLSHIT YOU’RE TRYING TO PULL NOW.
It gets better.
The Senate–holy fuck, don’t you love the Senate?–proposed an amendment to the bill that would EXTEND the motherfucking moratorium until the end of 2017.
I’m a writer, and I don’t have words. I would not permit these Republicans to lick the mud off my boots. Duplicitous, cowardly sacks of shit who have no qualms turning queer and trans people into political football for your asinine political fucking theatre. Fuck. Every. Single. One of you.
It’s time the football kicked back.
-Shiv
This post also appears on Modern Liberals.
Although it is entirely ordinary for the management positions of government administration to rotate when new governments are elected, over here in sane Canuckistan, most low- to mid-level administrators keep their positions. This is in part because they are hired to follow orders rather than issue them, so the logic there is that an administrator whose job is to spellcheck a report will still need to spellcheck reports regardless of who they come from.
Apparently that’s not good enough in Trumpland, because the transition team is asking the Energy Department to “provide a list of employees and contractors who attended United Nations climate meetings and worked on key Obama administration climate policies, including the social cost of carbon.”
Which is a pretty fucked up request. It’s one thing to turf the reality-based management of the EPA and the Energy Department, because the new administration is allergic to reality and a government is well within its rights to do so (regardless of how regrettable said action is). But for fuck sake, the employees who attended? The god damn minute-takers and personal assistants gotta go too?
I guess I just haven’t fully comprehended how much reality the incoming Trump administration is prepared to pretend doesn’t exist.
-Shiv
Content Notice: Victim blaming and trans antagonism.
It wasn’t even half a year ago when we were watching reactionaries come out of the woodwork to defend McCrory’s odious HB2. People who often admitted they had no knowledge or experience with gender variance suddenly felt justified in passing legislation that they deemed was for the “protection of women and girls.” The sentiment has been repeated many times by Republicans since, with no shortage of spewage coming out characterizing trans women as men, as rapists, as privacy violations, as monsters, so on and so forth.
I’m sure you’ll be devastated to learn that the reactionaries have a very odd idea of what constitutes “protection.” Zack Ford compares a number of prominent Conservative responses to Trump’s self-confessed behaviour in serially harassing and sexually assaulting women to their stance on transgender protections. (all emphasis added)
Gov. Mike Pence
On transgender protections: “Policies regarding the security and privacy of students in our schools should be in the hands of Hoosier parents and local schools, not bureaucrats in Washington, DC. The federal government has no business getting involved in issues of this nature. I am confident that parents, teachers and administrators will continue to resolve these matters without federal mandates and in a manner that reflects the common sense and compassion of our state.”
On Trump’s 2005 remarks: “It’s absolutely false to suggest that at any point in time we considered dropping off this ticket… He said last night very clearly that that was talk, not actions. And I believe him and I think the contrast between that and what the Clintons were involved in 20 years ago — the four women that were present last night — was pretty dramatic.”
…
James Dobson
On transgender protections: “If you are a married man with any gumption, surely you will defend your wife’s privacy and security in restroom facilities. Would you remain passive after knowing that a strange-looking man, dressed like a woman, has been peering over toilet cubicles to watch your wife in a private moment? What should be done to the pervert who was using mirrors to watch women and girls in their stalls?”
On Trump’s 2005 remarks: “The comments Mr. Trump made 11 years ago were deplorable and I condemn them entirely. I also find Hillary Clinton’s support of partial birth abortion criminal and her opinion of evangelicals to be bigoted. There really is only one difference between the two. Mr. Trump promises to support religious liberty and the dignity of the unborn. Mrs. Clinton promises she will not.”
…
Gary Bauer, American Values
On transgender protections: “This is yet another example of the Obama administration’s bizarre obsession to force women to be unwilling participants in a radical social experiment… Now Obama’s HUD bureaucrats are putting those women at risk for abuse and worse by men claiming to be women.”
On Trump’s 2005 remarks: “ The comments are obviously disgusting and unfortunate. But Donald Trump did not run as a evangelical or as somebody who ran the kind of campaign that a Pat Robertson would run. We’ll still support him, still work hard for him. His policies are 100% better than Hillary clinton’s for the country. I don’t see how any values voter that is sensible would take a tape from 11 years ago with totally inappropriate language and says somehow that leads me as a voter to stay home or vote for Hillary Clinton or throw your vote away on a third party candidate.”
In other words, Republicans are just fine with endangering women, as long as it’s Republicans who get to do the endangering.
We could check the criminology stats to see how often trans women commit crimes and what kinds of crimes they are… but that would be the rational thing to do, and Republicans are a little too busy moralizing to do any kind of introspection. They don’t see the contradiction between “all women lie about rape” and “all men talk like that.” Obviously, we can trust their judgement.
-Shiv
I wouldn’t call what I experience during interviews/debates with Trump’s surrogates pleasurable, but… yeah. No. That’s about it. It’s gross.
Behold, a crystal clear demonstration of the conservative deflector shield (video at link):
After Trump received a letter of endorsement from 88 retired military figures, Hall pointed out to Delgado that it was impossible to verify that Trump had donated to veterans charities because he refused to release his tax returns.
Delgado asserted that Trump “can’t release” his taxes because he is under IRS audit.
“Yes, you can,” Tall said. “There’s nothing that prevents you.”
Hall noted that Trump promised in 2014 that he would release his tax returns if he ran for president even though he was being audited at the time.
“Why is it you want them released?” Delgado quipped. “I think the bigger issue is Hillary Clinton’s medical records.”
“We don’t know where he’s invested his money,” Hall remarked, getting the interview back on track. “There was a New York Times report about ties to Chinese banks, potential investments in Russia. We need to know more about this presidential candidate. Why not release that information?”
Hall moved on to questions about Trump’s illegal donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi after she dropped a lawsuit against Trump University.
“It sounds like a situation of pay-for-play,” Hall observed.
“Pam Bondi asked for that donation before she even knew that some complaints had come into her office, hundreds of complaints,” Delgado insisted.
“He would say that there’s no way Hillary Clinton had this conversation and that this lawsuit did not come up,” Hall countered. “Remember all the suspicions regarding [Attorney General Loretta Lynch] and Bill Clinton on the plane? Donald Trump would not accept that as answer.”
Delgado insisted that the donations to Bondi were “not suspicious” because Trump was a “friend.”
The Trump surrogate then attempted to pivot to “pay-for-play” at the Clinton Foundation, but Hall wasn’t having it.
Did you hear that? That sound was the sound of the deflectors being raised.
Or Delgado’s brain short circuiting. Either/or.
Sometimes it’s like watching someone try to crush a fruit fly with a sledge hammer.
‘Merica, you scary.
QUICK, THE FACTS ARE COMING, DEPLOY THE DEFLECTOR SHIELD.
-Shiv
Rawstory has a comprehensive review of Scott County’s HIV epidemic, charging that Mike Pence’s negligence, belligerent refusal to assess scientific evidence, and sanctimonious grandstanding are major contributors to the County’s state of decay. It’s a long but worthwhile read. It introduces a number of extremely useful and effective public health concepts that have been governing more successful healthcare systems for decades. It also demonstrates that breaking the poverty cycle is complex and multi-faceted. Deteriorating mental health, trauma and violence, addictions, a lack of education, health complications compounded by no healthcare, teen pregnancy, epidemics–the list goes on, and it’s not a cheap list to fix.
Content Notice for brutal, sociopathic classism and ableism:
Apparently not convinced from their many defeats in the many levels of court, Texas lawmakers have vowed to pull a North Carolina come their next session in January, further demonstrating my belief that authoritarians must receive vaccines to immunize them against irony:
GOP state Rep. Matt Shaheen told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for a story published Sunday, that he plans to introduce a bill that would prohibit cities, counties and school districts from allowing transgender people to use restrooms based on their gender identity.
“We’re taking that ability away,” Shaheen said. “We should leave that power where it should reside, at the state and federal level. I think this is such a silly topic. At the end of the day, this is about common sense and decency.”
No it’s fucking not, Shaheen. Common sense and decency would be actually doing something useful with your time, and instead you are perpetuating a violent lobby that makes it impossible to exist while trans. It’s a cultural genocide. To say it is “indecent” would be putting it lightly.
Shaheen is joined by another witless cocksplat, Bill Zedler
GOP Rep. Bill Zedler, who once tried to ban LGBT resource centers on state university campuses, told the Star-Telegramthat the issue of trans restroom use “raises concerns mainly because anytime you want to make it where someone who self-identifies as a man … can now go into the woman’s restroom, I believe it puts small children at risk as well as … inconveniencing 99, 98 percent of the population so a very small percent of the population can supposedly feel comfortable.”
They’re not even fucking trying to understand at this point.
Jesus fucking christ. I inconvenience you by existing? Fuck off, you predatory sacks of shit.
-Shiv
Caitlyn Jenner has said and done no shortage of odious things in defence of the Republican party, but now is an excellent time to remind everyone that her transition is not one of them. In this latest spat, Jenner asserts that Trump would be “good for women and the LGBT community:”
“I’m on the conservative Republican side. I’m not excited with what Obama has done to the economy, to our Constitution, all that kind of stuff. But as far as the transgender community, they’ve actually been very good,” Caitlyn told Stat. “Everybody looks at the Democrats as being better with these issues. But Trump seems to be very much for women. He seems very much behind the LGBT community because of what happened in North Carolina with the bathroom issue. He backed the LGBT community. But in Trump’s case, there’s a lot more unknowns. With Hillary, you pretty much know what you’re gonna get with the LGBT community.”
I’ll make my point short and simple:
I’m not excited with what Obama has done to the economy, to our Constitution, all that kind of stuff.
You’re not excited that Title IX was extended to trans folk? Okay then…