The plan is not much, but I’ve reached Portland and expect to be downtown near the federal building at some point this evening.
Where are you? What are you doing to preserve democracy in your neck of the woods? And if you’re in Portland and willing to come downtown, sound off!
Many millennia ago, a full 275 years BT, an insightful composer once wrote the immortal words,
All we like sheep.
And as true as it is that we all find delight in ovine innocence and playfulness, it is perhaps time to update this ancient sentiment to something more of our moment. I suggest
All we like Janelle Shane.
Should you doubt, you have only to read her new short story in the online science fiction magazine, Strange Horizons.
A short story in such times as ours may seem insufficient. To that notion, I say, Beep. And yet more unexpectedly, Beep.
This pride month, Google has been using their doodles to honor QTs of color, and today is Marsha P. Johnson. I’m very happy about the doodle, which is quite attractive, and has a whimsical flair that I imagine is appropriate, though I never did meet her:
A colorful illustration of Marsha P Johnson, Stonewall veteran and co-founder (with Sylvia Rivera) of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, the best named and best acronymed group of people in the ever.
There’s also a wonderful effort, reported by CNN, to replace a local statue of Christopher Columbus with one of Johnson in her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey:
In Elizabeth, New Jersey, there’s another push to keep Johnson’s memory alive.
A 19-year-old woman has created a petition — which in less than two weeks has garnered more than 40,000 signatures — to replace a statue of Christopher Columbus in the city with one of Johnson.
The creator, Celine Da Silva, told CNN she thinks an honor for the activist in her hometown is long overdue.
“Being that this is her hometown, I think that we should be celebrating her and honoring her here,” Da Silva told CNN. “And I think that the LGBT and queer community should be able to learn more about historic figures from their own community.”
Da Silva and her boyfriend have plans to bring up their demand to the city council next month. They say they hope a new monument for Johnson will be the first of many steps to create a more inclusive Elizabeth and one that celebrates minorities and LGBT figures like Johnson.
Marsha P. Johnson, a black transgender woman, was a central figure in the gay liberation movement
The late activist’s family, who still live in the New Jersey city today, say the movement to honor Johnson in her hometown gives them hope.
What I’m less happy about is the deadnaming by certain articles engendered by this doodle. For Rolling Stone, they feature Johnson’s deadname prominently, at the opening of their second paragraph:
Google has unveiled a new logo illustration (“Google Doodle”) for Marsha P. Johnson, the pioneering LGBTQ rights activist and self-identified drag queen who was a pivotal figure in the original Gay Liberation Front and the Stonewall Riots.
Born [Deadname]., on August 24th, 1945, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Johnson moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village upon graduating from high school, where she adopted her drag queen persona and legally changed her name to Marsha P. Johnson. (The “P.” stood for “pay it no mind,” a phrase she allegedly used to describe her gender.)
I don’t speak for Johnson, but this trend (followed in other articles as well) doesn’t sit well with me. Regardless how Johnson described herself in life, we do know for sure that she legally changed her name (EDIT: it turns out that we don’t know this for sure), and I would think that it’s well known by know that this is disrespectful where legal name changes have happened and even in cases where a legal change hasn’t happened but the expressed wish of the individual is clear and/or context makes it clear that using a former name is no longer appropriate.
So I’m glad for Google, but I’m disappointed in how this is being covered in the press today.
Do better, writers. Do better.
ETA: In a comment by a casual reader (yes, that’s the name of the commenter, not my description) down below, there’s a link to the wikipedia talk page for the article about Marsha P Johnson. The people engaged in that discussion know a fuck of a lot more than I do about Johnson and claim that Johnson did not legally change names. Though they don’t cite sources for good information on some of their claims there, they aren’t hesitant to single out a couple of sources of bad information. They also sound quite certain about the no-legal-name-change thing, although I noted that there seems to be some equivocation going on between some people saying that there was no legal name change and others stating that Johnson’s birth certificate was not changed.
As someone who knows exactly how hard that is to do, especially when you no longer live in the state where you were born (although anywhere in New Jersey was at least physically closer to NYC than Sacramento or really any California court was to me when I was changing my ID), I’m not as worried about BirthCert gender/name as I am about something like a driver’s license or state ID card which would have been in Johnson’s power to change in the 90s, and I am even more concerned about the name actually used with the friends that Johnson most trusted and loved. From those best friends, from those most supportive family members, did Johnson want to be called only Marsha P Johnson? Did it change day to day? Month to month? For me that matters.
However, it also makes Rolling Stone’s choice more understandable. I still wish that they wouldn’t have done it. I simply don’t see the benefit unless this was how Johnson wanted to be addressed in the media, by and to people who would never meet Johnson in person. But in light of the uncertainty, my disappointment in Rolling Stone is lessened.
I don’t write about Jewishness much. For most Jews, I’m Jewish enough. But not for all, and I see their point. My adult atheism makes it easier for me to pass, or even just deny any Jewishness if I were the type of person to want to do so. My childhood distance from Judaism means that I don’t feel the pain of anti-semitic insults as acutely as many. I have no Holocaust stories in my family to feed the watchful eye that notices anti-semitism at all.
I am, in short, a Jew hardly harmed by anti-semitism.
It is largely for this reason that I struggle with taking positions on Israel. I don’t have to have Holocaust stories in my own family to remember the stories told to me by congregant’s parents. My time writing newsletter articles for my shul had me taking down the words of people whose parents had survived the concentration camps. I know the effect is real, and lasting. I’ve seen it impact friends and co-congregants. When they tell me how desperate they feel when it seems Israel is under attack, i hear the shift in timbre. I feel the anxious air between us.
I kinda love it.
For those who thought the residential schools nightmare was over, I present you Lakeside Academy in Kalamazoo. Don’t read any further without preparing yourself for the horror you know is coming.
16-year-old Cornelius Fredericks [sic – actually “Frederick”] died on May 1 after suffering a heart attack on April 29.
Why did his heart stop on April 29th? I will never GEORGE FLOYD guess, will I?
[S]taff sat on his chest as he lost consciousness. …Employees waited 12 minutes to call 911, even though Fredericks was limp and unresponsive.” …[V]ideo from Lakeside Academy shows a staff member placing his/her weight directly on Fredericks’ chest for nearly ten minutes as the victim lost consciousness.
Land O’ Lakes, still getting slammed.
As I’m sure that y’all have heard, SCOTUS has decided that the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s Title VII bans employment discrimination against folks on the basis of sexual orientation and being trans. The opinion was even written by a conservative justice. I’ll probably cover the decision in more detail later (though it’s been very hard to write lately), but right now I just want to call out how utterly ineffective I have been in pushing for change.
I had no effect on this decision at all.
And yet, the heart of this decision is simply taking a traditional legal test seriously. This is the “but for” test, and is used in liability cases of many kinds, as well as occasionally in other ares of law. The “but for” test is used this way:
Would the alleged harm have come to pass if all circumstances were the same but for one fact.
Try this one, which fits my mood:
I did not realize kids were learning so many cool fighting techniques from anime.
Yes, I know I’m cynical a lot of times, and it seems like the times when it all goes to complete shit that I would be in my natural element. But I’m not. I’m just feeling terrible about all this the last couple weeks, and my usual snark and satire feel poorly suited to our current moment.
But this has a lot to do with how I practice it. My snark and satire, when it’s not used for self-deprecating humor, is most targeted at authoritarians and their supporters. Writing merely factual pieces feels useless right now, and you can get news from other places than this blog. Writing satire and snark feels completely inadequate, since there appears to be nothing short of exploding a nuclear weapon on US territory that Trump and his supporters won’t do.
So, I haven’t been contributing much to FtB lately. But I have found a bit of humor that does make me feel better in this moment. it’s not by me, and I haven’t been able to trace the source yet, but I place it here for what enjoyment you might be able to take in this otherwise horrible and sad moment:
…an anarchist and her mom prepare for a protest…