Gender News: Cis people are insane, refuse help

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Say Her Name: Ma’Khia Bryant

The details are sketchy at this point and a number of important things, including how to spell her name and even her age are being reported differently in different places, but from the best information I have right now (which could easily change later):

A foster child, 15 years old, whose name was Ma’Khia Bryant, was being bullied and attacked by other foster kids, probably other girls. She called police for protection. At some point before police arrived (possibly even before she called them?) she acquired a knife to use in self-defense. When the police arrived there was some sort of altercation between Ma’Khia and at least one other girl. At this point she may or may not have been still holding the knife. It’s even possible that someone else had taken the knife from her, but I don’t consider that likely.

Police seeing a physical altercation with a knife involved shot to kill Ma’Khia, the girl who called desperate for protection. She is dead.

I don’t give a god damn if Ma’Khia had the knife in her hand and was swinging it: she was in state custody (unless this detail is also wrong, I fucking hate how different stories are saying different things, but none seemed to say that she **wasn’t** in state custody, it’s just that some stories don’t mention foster care at all), and the state owed her better. Even if there was an immediate necessity to protect the other child because Ma’Khia was swinging the knife, that only backs up responsibility from the cops to the foster system that shouldn’t have put her in that situation to begin with.

To make matters worse, the Mayor of Columbus, Ohio where Ma’Khia was killed called her a “young woman” who “lost her life”, probably between the couch cushions.

Ma’Khia was not a young woman. She was a child, a girl. It’s bad enough that the mayor would say such a thing, but it is much worse than that in that there is a long trend of Black children being treated as adults to maximize the blame that can be placed upon them while white young adults are called “children” or “teenagers” to minimize the blame that can be placed on them. Kyle Rittenhouse is a perfect example of the latter.

I’ll keep watching things, but FUCK THIS SHIT. I’m so sick and tired police violence. I’m so sick and tired of the government killing the people it has a duty to protect.

Live Coverage of MN Protests for BLM Mon April 12: Shots fired

I’m obviously not in MN, but there’s quite a lot to see in the live coverage provided by Unicorn Riot.

Less than 5 minutes ago there was audible gunfire. The reporter was speculating that it was coming from protesters shooting bullets into the air. Obviously that’s very dangerous, since the bullets won’t reach escape velocity. I’m not entirely clear why the reporter thought it was protesters, but I’m assuming it’s because they have a general sense of distance and direction. Here’s hoping this shit doesn’t escalate further.

ETA: I thought I might add multiple updates to this as more info came in, but the protests were almost over when this happened. Everyone has gone home for the night and from where Unicorn Riot was filming there was simply no way to get any more info about the shooter, not even whether or not they were arrested. Because things ended so quickly after I wrote this post (maybe 10-15 minutes, tops) there’s simply nothing of substance to add, but I thought I had to at least write “nothing else happened” here lest the dangerous cliffhanger become needlessly alarming over the long hours of the night.

I’m not going to head to Minnesota like I went to Portland, but I’ll keep an eye on Unicorn Riot’s channel & make posts if I notice something important.

Boston PD Are Rapist Scumbags

So it has come out that Boston PD protected a pedophile rapist, and Boston officers then voted that scumbag their union president.

Now retired, the scumbag has been arrested for raping the daughter of one of his previous victims. The daughter. 25 years later.

What is the Boston PD response to this? Apparently they’re fighting like hell to prevent any records of the previous investigations from coming to light.

So it comes to this: if they aren’t able to pin this coverup, this complicity, this conspiracy on specific Boston officers, then obviously the only proper response for the general public is to treat ALL Boston officers as if they are actively supporting rapists who wear badges. How many of the cops are actual rapists and how many just support giving rapists the authority to command respect, to command obedience, to preside over the interests of police officers as union president, and even to, it nauseates me to say, even to investigate the rape of children. He literally questioned child victims of other rapists, and the police officers above him allowed that. They gave him the power to do that. They specifically assigned him to do that task.

So this is the choice you’ve given  us, motherrapists. Either you clean house, or the whole house is dirty. You even had decades to watch what happened to the Catholic church and learned nothing, did nothing. And the job of a cop isn’t forgiveness; it isn’t grace. Even in 1995 you Boston PD scumbags didn’t have the same excuse as the Catholic church had, as completely unacceptable as that excuse may have been.

You in the Boston PD must be treated socially as if scumbags guilty of conspiracy to rape children, one and all, unless and until you become an organization that doesn’t give these foul gifts to rapists.

This isn’t overreaction. This isn’t emotion. This is the position we are in. This is the position you Boston PD scumbags have put us in: we know that SOME of you are supporting rape, but we don’t know WHICH of you are supporting rape. We have to protect ourselves, and that means that until we have some certainty not just that some of you are innocent, but which exact persons are innocent and why, we simply cannot trust you with power.

Eat shit, Boston PD. Each one of you eat a copper cauldron of shit.

 

 

Kyrsten Sinema: Are you experienced?

Imagine, just now, that you are smiling your day away in Seattle and happen to come upon a bronze statue while meandering the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Not just any statue, but a statue festooned with markers of love, one that quite obviously serves as a memorial to a cherished persona. The afro’d subject may have a tie, an actual, silk tie, around its neck. Or perhaps it has been knit-bombed and is somehow wearing a panel sweater somehow attached to its torso in ways that you, not a fiber artist yourself, find disconcertingly impossible unless someone had literally stood on this sidewalk for day after day knitting the sweater directly onto the bronze. Votive candles and tea lights may be scattered round of course, though only lit for a few hours each evening. Though other times the mementoes and scattered tchotchkes are cleared away, treated as clutter, garbage to be removed by the nearby businesses who prefer a clean aesthetic. One can never be quite sure how one will encounter it.

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Transsexual, Transgender, Trans… and that damn asterisk

I’ve been asked again about why I sometimes use an asterisk after the word “trans” when describing the broader transsexual and transgender community (which, tbh, aren’t even thought of that anymore so much as just “the trans community”). Me being me, I didn’t just throw up a link, but I attempted to write again what it has meant in my life. I like this version, so I’m copying it from where it was originally written over to here. This way, hopefully, this bit of community and individual history is less likely to get lost, and maybe next time I can simply offer someone a simple link instead of spending 3 hours collecting my thoughts on the topic again.

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