I did guilt. I did snark. I did civic duty. I did harm reduction. I got angry. This is me begging. Please…vote.
Democratic institutions won’t come to life like a bad Michael Bay movie and fight fascism themselves. Captain Separation of Powers isn’t a hero that can be called like Captain Planet when fascism is too big for the Democrateers to handle on their own. Democratic institutions are made up of people and if those people sell out, buy in, or knuckle under when confronted with a threat because they see which way the wind is blowing, there goes the institution you thought would protect you. It’s just a piece of paper….a building….an idea that no one is going to stop someone from stepping on.
The US has a long history of the ruling elite (white men) walking right through democratic institutions to get what they want when they think no one will or can stop them (and no one does). Maybe not everything gets better, but for two years we’ve been living the nightmare of how it can always get worse.
The people who have been warning us that this might be the last election before we go all in with a fascist dictatorship are the exact same people who have been right every single step of the way about what this administration would do and what it was capable of. The people who are saying there’s no way that can happen because of X institution, Y separation of powers, or Z check and balance are the same ones who have been wrong in their facehole every time they said that said there was no way would be exactly, precisely where we are today.
According to a draft memo leaked to The New York Times, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based solely and immutably on the genitals they are born with.
The memo claims that processes for deciding the sex on a birth certificate will be “clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable”.
The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour. Worse, it would undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.
Furthermore, biology is not as straightforward as the proposal suggests. By some estimates, as many as one in 100 people have differences or disorders of sex development, such as hormonal conditions, genetic changes or anatomical ambiguities, some of which mean that their genitalia cannot clearly be classified as male or female. For most of the twentieth century, doctors would often surgically alter an infant’s ambiguous genitals to match whichever sex was easier, and expect the child to adapt. Frequently, they were wrong. A 2004 study tracked 14 genetically male children given female genitalia; 8 ended up identifying as male, and the surgical intervention caused them great distress (W. G. Reiner and J. P. Gearhart N. Engl. J. Med.350, 333–341; 2004).
November 1: Happy 34th Birthday to Korean-American Michaela Dietz, who provided the Voice of One of the Members of the Crystal Gems alongside Steven, Pearl, Amethyst, Garnet, Bismuth, Peridot, and Lapis and the Only Crystal Gem that was made in the Kindergarten, the Steven Universe Character of Amethyst.
I did my master’s thesis on emergency contraception and I used gender-neutral language throughout. Most people didn’t notice. My supervisor occasionally asked me to use the word “women” instead of the word “people” but didn’t care enough to follow up when I ignored him. None of the people who reviewed and marked my thesis made any comment on the language I chose to use.
Using gender-neutral language was easy and I suffered no consequences for doing so as an academic, even when writing a detailed thesis on human reproductive biology.
AlexTheGhost 