Over half of young trans people have contemplated suicide. Now up to a third of us could lose the care that’s been proven to prevent it.

In states across the country, small-minded lawmakers are pushing cruel, vicious new bills targeting transgender children.

These bills threaten to ban everything from medical care to even acknowledging the existence of trans people in the classroom. Many threaten parents and medical providers with prosecution. And all of them put the lives of young trans people at risk.

If these laws had been passed when I was transitioning, I might not be alive today.

As a trans student in middle school, I was dehumanized. I endured harassment, abuse, and physical violence for which I was the one punished. Even worse, my school responded to my coming out with harmful new policies.

For example, I was banned from the bathrooms. Instead of using the girls’ room near my classrooms, I had to go down two flights of stairs, across an open courtyard, into another school building, and all the way to the end of another building to use the nurse’s office bathroom.

They’re coming for me!

Sounds like a horror movie on permanent rewind through the brain, through the soul. Catch your breath, buy a gun. What other choice do you have? It’s called, among other things, “white replacement theory” — but my sense is that the fear itself (fear of God-knows-what) comes first. When it finds a name, what a sense of relief that must be: knowing who the enemy is, where the enemy lives. Now you can go to war.

Killing ten people at a grocery store — killing fifty people at two mosques—isn’t murder. It’s healing.

I take a deep breath. Violence is situation normal, not just in the United States but across much of the planet. Often the violence is simply an abstraction, a.k.a., war, which is always, always necessary when we’re the ones who wage it, and the people we kill, including the children, are simply collateral damage. But war always comes home, where the victims are fully human . . . if they actually make the news.

State and nationally recognized election transparency and integrity advocates were threatened with arrest and prevented from observing routine election administration activities by Wake County election administrator Gary Sims, in violation of North Carolina State Election Law. North Carolina’s 2005 “Confidence in ElectionsAct”1 protects the rights of the public to observe election counting, stating: “Any member of the public wishing to witness the vote count at any level shall be allowed to do so.”

On May 14, Sims directed law enforcement to cite Lynn Bernstein, the founder of Transparent Elections North Carolina, and John Brakey, director of AUDIT USA, with trespassing. Sims threatened Bernstein and Brakey with arrest if they attended the public meeting at the Board of Elections on May 17. Bernstein was told by the law enforcement officer that she was banned from the premises “forever.” (Hear audio of the conversation with the law enforcement officials at this link: https://bit.ly/3LoclIU)

Wednesday, May 18, 12noon, Ohio Statehouse

H.B. 434 — The “Advanced Nuclear Technology Helping Energize Mankind (ANTHEM) Act” — is another radioactive taxpayer boondoggle that has passed the Ohio House and has moved on to the Ohio Senate! They haven’t even revoked H.B. 6 yet, and not one of the conspirators in H.B. 6 has gone to jail, but this is an even bigger swindle.

One company stands to benefit — eGeneration, of Cleveland — and the floodgate will be open for others. This is Corporate Welfare! H.B. 434 will create an unaccountable nuclear agency with no responsibility to the public.

The agency will be buried in the notoriously secretive JobsOhio nonprofit corporation, excused from public accessibility under the Open Records Act, the Sunshine Act, and Ohio’s ethics laws; will have no budget limits on use of taxpayer funds; provides no financial protections for the public from accidents or spills; is vague about radioactive waste handling and disposal, and many other important aspects.

Speakers: Pat Marida, Ohio Sierra Club’s Nuclear Free Committee; Terry Lodge, Attorney; and others.

Our brilliant, intense, path-breaking hour-long exploration of the imminent demise of Roe v. Wade is led by the great Christian Nunes, President of the National Organization for Women.  

Christian’s incisive, uncompromising view of this latest Puritan attack on women sets the tone for an important examination of Calvinist fascism and its heartless autocracy, especially as they come with the race-based slaughter of 10 African-Americans in Buffalo.

As this 95th Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection (GREE-GREE) zoom unfolds, we also discuss the INDIGENOUS ORIGINALISM of thousands of years of tribal law in which a woman’s ability to control her own body was never questioned.

In the course of our discussion we hear further from MARY BUTLER-STONEWALL, CHARLOTTE DENNETT, DENNIS BERNSTEIN, JOEL SEGAL, NEIL PENN, DR. RUTH STRAUSS, MICHAEL BRACKNEY and many more.

JULIE WEINER tells us about the fight over voting machines in New York, which has also had big news about Gerrymandering.