DOJ: Businesses Can Discriminate Against Transgender Workers (1) (1)

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DOJ: Businesses Can Discriminate Against Transgender Workers (1) (1):
elfwreck:

motelmachines:

whyyoustabbedme:

This is fucked up

Incredibly fucked up

also if this happens a lot of trans people may end up homeless and the. the government turns the other eye- proves how much they hate us!!!!!

For non-trans people who think, “eh, that’s sad, but it only affects a tiny fraction of the people,” NO IT DOESN’T - this is laying the groundwork for discrimination against women by declaring that it’s okay to treat the sexes differently. If everyone has the same rights, it doesn’t matter what gender someone is.

They’re claiming that it’s not discrimination to fire a trans woman for wearing skirts, because it’s not discrimination to say that only women can wear skirts and men must wear pants. They want to claim that sex-specific policies aren’t innately a form of discrimination - meaning they want to be able to say, “women must wear skirts; men must wear pants; this is equivalent treatment;” they want to be able to say, “women must smile at the customers; men don’t need to (oh maybe we can say men have to shake hands with customers if they’re receptionists),” and so on.

To erode women’s rights, first they have to erase trans rights, because their whole hierarchy is based on WHITE MEN ON TOP and they can’t establish that if the definition of “men” keeps changing on them. If someone who used to be labeled a “man” is now a woman, or vice versa, their claim that men are just innately more suited to be in charge, falls apart.

FIGHT THIS FIGHT THIS FIGHT THIS.

You can’t do anything to affect the courts, but you can:

VOTE next Tuesday (or before, if you have that option);

Treat trans women as women, trans men as men;

If you misgender someone, apologize and make an effort to remember the correct term;

Call out mistreatment when you see it, including in jokes - “I don’t think that’s funny; could you explain it to me?”

Refuse to help with mistreatment if it’s part of your job - delay getting things done, lose paperwork, correct people’s genders on forms if they’ve been switched, and so on.
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Donald Trump meet Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese American

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Donald Trump meet Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese American cook who is the father of ‘birthright citizenship’:

lazaefair:

Young men like Wong were not called “anchor babies” by critics then, but rather “accidental citizens,” said University of New Hampshire legal historian Lucy Salyer, “citizens by the accident of birth” as the dissenting justices in Wong Kim Ark’s Supreme Court case would put it.

What he did not know was that “they were looking for some poor chump,” Salyer told the Washington Post, to make an example of, at the nation’s highest court. And that “chump” was Wong Kim Ark. So there it was, the intimidating-sounding case of The United States vs. Wong Kim Ark, a cook.

Yet he won.

And in the annals of civil rights in America, it was a “huge” case, said Salyer. The justice who wrote the opinion for the court’s majority, was fully aware that its implications went far beyond the Chinese. As the justice who authored the majority opinion in U.S. vs. Wong Kim Arkwrote, “to hold that the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution excludes from citizenship the children, born in the United States, of citizens or subjects of other countries would be to deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.” Had the decision gone the other way, Salyer said, instead of a nation of immigrants, America would have become “colonies of foreigners.”

This man is the reason why I am a considered a citizen of the United States and not an “accidental citizen” or “anchor baby” or “excluded” due to the color of my skin and shape of my eyes. 

Read this. Learn our history. AND VOTE. Vote like your life depends on it. Your friends’ lives certainly do.

Further reading:

https://www.scpr.org/blogs/multiamerican/2011/01/19/7987/who-was-wong-kim-ark/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark

http://encyclopedia.densho.org/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark/
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HA Ancillary Justice is available as an ebook from

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HA Ancillary Justice is available as an ebook from Buffalo/Erie Co Library! 

Nothing can stop me now. I’m not even going to wait for the new Kindle. 

HA HA HA HA HA
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So You’re A Gentile Who’s Realized We

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prismatic-bell:

Tumblr likes to spin its wheels and spend time yelling at each other, so here’s a nice comprehensive guide. Five Things You Can Do Now That You Know We Were Serious About The Antisemitism:

1) Accept that if you’re in this to be an ally, you’re going to have a tough road ahead of you. We’re traditionally very wary of outsiders in our spaces because when we welcome them, well … this happens. In fact, if you want to convert to Judaism, you traditionally get rejected three times, just to make sure you’re serious and not shitting with us. Expect wariness. Expect to get your feelings hurt, because a lot of us are very raw right now. Stick with us anyway–once we know you’re not just bandwagoning us, you’re going to end up with a lot of friends who are relying on you. Nobody said allyship was easy.

2) Learn about Judaism. Note that I DO NOT MEAN LEARNING WITH INTENTION TO CONVERT. We don’t proselytize and it would be against Torah for me to even suggest it. What I mean here is, you can’t call bullshit if you don’t know what we’re about. Some good basic resources are The Jewish Book of Why by Alfred Kolatch; My Jewish Learning; and for a strict Orthodox standpoint, Chabad. You’ll find that some things in these sources contradict each other. That’s pretty par for the course in Judaism; we don’t have a single dogma or point of view.

3) Consider calling a local synagogue and asking if they have volunteer work for a gentile ally. Introduce yourself, explain (briefly) what got your attention, and offer your services–to stand outside during services, to walk folks to and from shul (this is particularly important in Orthodox communities, where driving on Shabbat is forbidden), hell, to help stuff envelopes for whatever vigil or service they may be holding in memoriam. Anything will help.

4) You may wish to make a donation to a local synagogue or Jewish charity. I strongly recommend the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), which is a Jewish charity focused on combating antisemitism. Jews traditionally give monetary gifts in sums of $18, which corresponds to the numeric value of the word “chai,” or “life.” The last time this happened I made a post about this tradition and got accused of being a Nazi because of the whole 1-8 A-H thing, so let’s just nip that right in the bud: yes, we know. It’s a horrible coincidence. We’re not giving up a few-thousand-year-old tradition because of some dipshit with a bad moustache. If you can’t afford $18, consider moving the decimal over and donating in multiples of 18, like $3.60. Your meaning will still be perfectly clear, and anything helps. If you wish to make a donation in memory/in honor (which many synagogues appreciate), I suggest either choosing the name of one of the shooting victims–giving tzedakah, or charity, in their names is considered a great mitzvah and a blessing to their families–or using the phrase “am Yisrael chai.” It means “Israel lives.” Although the country in the MENA region is called Israel, this is not what the phrase refers to–the traditional patriarch of Judaism was named Jacob, and renamed as Israel following a wrestling match with a messenger of G-d. To say “am Yisrael chai” is to say his people, that is, the Jewish people, live.

And on that note …

5) In the coming days and weeks, you’re going to see a lot of people making this about Israel or Zionism. Please tell them to shut the fuck up. Israel, Zionism, and Jews are three completely different, albeit related, things. To wit: Israel is a geopolitical country situated on the site of our ancestral homeland and currently headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Zionism is the belief that Jews deserve a safe homeland; and Jews are a group of people spread across six continents and most countries who are united by a common group of ancestors from the Levant (the part of the world now occupied by the geopolitical entity known as Israel). Saying the victims of this shooting had anything to do with the political situation in Israel would be like saying I, personally, am responsible for Vladimir Putin because I have a Russian ancestor. I speak exactly two words of Russian, have never been to Russia, have no family left living there (and haven’t for four generations), but I’m totally responsible for Russia. You see how ridiculous that sounds? The same applies to Jews and Israel. Please, please, PLEASE do not conflate this event with Israeli politics. I’m not saying Israeli politics aren’t a topic worth discussing–I’m saying this is not a discussion they belong in. Don’t let the powers that be (or the alt-right sleaze that sucks the dicks of the powers that be) distract from the topic at hand, which is “out of control guns meet out of control xenophobia and antisemitism,” by throwing OMG ISRAEL AND ZIONISM AND GLOBALISM into the mix.

And finally: yes, gentiles, this is okay for you to reblog. In fact I encourage it. And I will answer any questions you have to the best of my ability, if they’re asked in good faith. Please just follow the most basic tenet of Judaism, which is: don’t be a dick.

If you’re ready to stand and help, now is the time.
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oh man i just finished ancillary justice.there’s

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oh man i just finished ancillary justice.

there’s a lot of similarities to murderbot, but an entirely different tone. fascinating.

i was really confused by the worldbuilding. i got it, i think, but. it was a lot. i haven’t decided how i felt about it. the use of “she” as the default pronoun is really fascinating and the way it makes my brain work is really really really fascinating.

pronoun use was fascinating. also, grammar and gender! very hampered by being in English but if it was in anything but English I couldn’t have read it.

I’m making myself wait until tomorrow to see if the next book in the trilogy is available from the library.
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Murder Of A Working Ghost: A Cozy Mystery to make you dance for joy (The Dancing Detective Series Bo

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Murder Of A Working Ghost: A Cozy Mystery to make you dance for joy (The Dancing Detective Series Book 2) - Kindle edition by Robyn Beecroft. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.:

There was already a post about this going around but now i can’t find it.

This is a really great little mystery novel, very on-theme for Halloween, with a very of-the-moment Tumblr kind of vibe, featuring a great set of main characters, a young not-posh British girl of Nigerian heritage just figuring out she’s asexual, and her roommate, a semi-closeted very fashionable gay young man from a very upper-crust background coming to terms with how abusive his upbringing was despite all the class privilege, and oh also a pair of murders in a Haunted Ghost Walk, and some Fenlands poachers and some morris dancers and some cosplay and SCA-type re-enactors, all very vividly and kind of lovingly described. It’s a great read, I haven’t read the rest of the series but it’s not necessary to do so.

So, if you’re like me and cannot, absolutely cannot, stomach Creepy Shit, but want something Halloweeny, this is a great, quick read, with a little blood and some mild suspense but nothing that’s going to have you hiding under your covers too creeped-out to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you know?

Four stars, highly recommended! 
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