"I live in a red state my vote doesn't ma-"

If your vote didn't matter they wouldn't try so hard to make it harder to vote in red states. Voting in red states can turn them into swing states like Georgia, Ohio, and Arizona. And voting in blue states can keep them from becoming swing states.

California used to be Red. Texas was Blue long ago. Florida was once a swing state. Obama took Indiana but it's gone redder since. Ten years ago Arizona and Georgia going blue was unthinkable.

Things change and we can make them change.

And that's before getting into more local elections. Turning cities blue, the state legislature.

Red states have flipped blue in recent years at those levels too.

Because people vote, and if we vote in high enough numbers we can turn a tight election into a walk in the park. If we vote in high enough numbers, we can turn a loss into a win. So many good things have happened in states where someone won by like 100 votes. (arizona is one)

When you look at the totals for Red States, a LOT of them are only a few % apart. 51/49, 48/52 sort of thing. The kind of thing that could be flipped with some effort.

Indiana went blue in 2008, thanks largely to Lake county (next to Chicago) and Marion (Indianapolis.) So the GOP then changed the rules for early voting in Marion county, so Indy's 1 million+ voters only had 1 voting site, with restricted hours. It took until 2018 to reverse that.

And yet! Even with the voter suppression, Mike Pence barely won the Governor's seat, 49% to 46%. His Democratic opponent was extremely boring. Literally his main selling point was that he had a goofy mustache. And yet! The election was that close!

I really think a lot of seats could be flipped if progressives actually put money and effort into campaigning there and fighting to increase voting access. People do not like Republican policies! But too often Red States are brushed off as hopeless and people don't even bother.

So the remarkable thing about the dystopian regime of the plea bargain is that its a collective action problem yea? If a critical mass of defendants in a county criminal court just refused to play ball, they would have leverage over the prosecutors like god had leverage over sodom. The whole machinery would crash to a cataclysmic halt and the other side would be at their knees. As a group, its... calling it the clear winning move trivialises it. It would be dominion. Ascension. A localised eschaton.

And it will never, ever happen. Partly bc the gains from defecting are (individually) way way too good. Good enough in hoc saeculo, but if any serious collective effort to realise this were undertaken the DA would start selling them heaven and earth to break ranks. But partly bc there is no circumstance less conducive to organising than a literal prisoners dilemma but with however many thousand agents. They have enough trouble getting autoworkers in alabama to vote not to remain serfs, imagine trying to somehow coordinate a bunch of miscreants being purposefully driven insane locked up in the county jail. And it wouldnt just be the prosecutors theyd have to fight against, defence attorneys stand to lose super hard from individual instances of cooperation on their clients parts too. Nobody with letters after their name in the courtroom would not be kicking and screaming these ppl were exercising their constitutional rights. It would take a miracle

But it would be so cool. It would be the coolest thing ever.

on the contrary, it has been done on occasion, and it works! public defenders dream of this, it’s one of the great longing fantasies of the field, but you do actually get it in the real world every so often. i skimmed this article a bit bc it focuses on why it’s treated as a fantasy but part ii briefly canvases some successes, like the #j20 cases. i’ve seen it done myself in one of those quasi-criminal civil contexts, resulting in a settlement that made almost everyone content, and it was indeed the coolest thing ever

The Cass Review, and what we can do about it

The UK government is making decisive moves toward banning trans healthcare outright. The NHS says it is adjusting its policies to be in line with the "cass report", a pseudoscientific report written by a transphobe that goes as far as to claim that little boys playing with trucks and little girls playing with dolls is biological, and which disregards dozens of scientifically sound previous studies into HRT and trans healthcare in order to reach its conclusions that trans healthcare for under 25s should be effectively eliminated.

This is genocidal. These moves will kill countless young trans people. I would not have made it to 25 if healthcare wasn't available and I know so many other trans people wouldn't have either.

The mainstream reporting in the UK is keeping itself ideologically cohesive by claiming that trans people exist, nobody hates them, and they're very rare, and the big problem is the explosion of new cases of not-really-trans people who are clogging up the system (this is a lie, the system has been intentionally slowed by malicious neglect, it isn't even a resource issue, the clinics have far more capacity than the number of patients who are let through)

Once again, this is genocidal and is actually a commonplace methodology of genocide. The nazis asked GRT people to help them understand which Traveller families were "real" travellers and which were the fake ones, since they insisted it was only the fake ones who were the problem and who had to be exterminated (because a lot of nazi GRT policy was based on American indigenous reservation policy).

Labour, the main opposiiton party in the UK, has announced it will "follow the Cass Report", and implement these restrictions on trans healthcare once in government.

For the survival of young trans people, robust community structures must be developed immediately.

Efforts to change the electoral situation will proceed at a snail's pace and will be entirely at the whims of what is politically expedient. It will turn around, but it will take a long time. At the voting level, everyone in the UK who cares about trans people needs to make it clear that they won't vote for Labour unless they reverse position on this, and to be clear about this: Labour will not listen. They are PR Brained Psychopaths and they don't want to get into this "controversial" issue in a way that might cost them further popularity and the easy election win.

Wes Streeting, inhuman lab experiment and Labour Shadow Health Secretary has said that activists need to "stop protesting to ask us to be better opposition and start protesting to ask us to be better government", in other words their electoral promises are cynical reactionary bargains and deals to get them into power and the only point at which they will change anything is once they are in government, if at all. I know this sounds very "push Biden left" but I'm not saying give up now - to repeat, everyone who cares about trans people in the UK should tell Labour to get fucked right away, and then keep doing it as loudly as possible, but it's just not going to change until after the general election at least.

Another way to help could be through legal routes, like the work that The Good Law Project has been doing for trans people for several years now, but I don't know enough about the law to know if it can be used to challenge this at all.

We have to accept there is no electoral solution right now to this genocidal campaign against trans people in the UK, and while those efforts are ongoing trans people and cis allies need to fucking organise. Trans exclusive / separatist organising is riddled with issues, I don't want to cast hopelessness around but there are really very few of us and while it's absolutely necessary to privilege trans voices in trans organising and give us the deciding power and the autonomy, we need to utilise the support and time and labour of every cis person who is willing to help in whatever way they can.

Robust community structures means community structures that are helping young trans people get healthcare as an absolute basic starting point, but it means a lot more than that besides. We need community structures that are consciously organised by people who are taking responsibility for the community roles they are in and being completely explicit with each other about the nature and function of their organising. We need HRT community resources so young trans people can survive this medical segregation, we need drug user harm reduction spaces so that what people turn to in despair doesn't kill them, we need sober spaces so that people can get away from unhealthy coping responses, we need conflict resolution structures so that our problems are dealt with privately and nobody is left completely isolated, but more than any of those things, and in order to have all of those things, we desperately need trans assemblies

Assemblies are how we will get a community of robust radical organisers, because only by repeatedly practicing the ongoing process of democracy can people learn how to do it in a way that will facilitate their own organising. We have to empower the whole community to answer our own questions, come up with solutions, organise people into structures to enact those solutions and then do them. All this means is that an open door event convenes frequently (at least fortnightly) to discuss what is happening in the community. Trans people get the mic for allotted time, and discuss the issues, and then whatever voting structure the assembly uses facilitates further discussion, for example through working groups - the assembly breaks into smaller groups to discuss the topic and then representatives report the outcomes of those discussions back and consensus is reached from what the representatives report.

We have to get people engaging in this process because in order to effectively combat this situation trans people must agree on the solutions and then tell cis allies how to help and so far we haven't been doing that. We really really haven't been. But we could be with a little work. And as I'm saying, doing this will also empower everyone in the community to organise toward specific solutions for specific issues like HRT provision, sober spaces, housing, food, etc.

fuck

I'll have more to add to this post later I have to get to therapy I just got really mad when I saw the news this morning

Okay I'm back. Therapy went well thanks for asking

I want to preempt here the thoughts that I know it's easy to have when this stuff feels overwhelming, that community organising "isn't enough" or it's too small to make the necessary change.

One of the ways that states maintain asymmetry in conflict with marginalised people is the dependence that the community has on resources the state controls. In concert with capitalism, the modern neoliberal state has disempowered and aliented individuals to a point where so much of the basics of survival and feeling like a human being feel out of our hands, and as soon as you start even just sharing regular meals with people that you're in community with you feel infinitely freer. But I'm not talking about food, I'm talking about healthcare.

Controlling the entire supply and distribution chain of HRT is how the state is able to say with such ease and swiftness that trans people can't have it. The power to reverse that is in the hands of the trans community and cis allies, if they simply begin to build community structures. The advantage of the state disappears, the independence and autonomy of the community materialises. The ability to meaningfully negotiate how any group of people engage with, delegate responsibility to, and consent to the power and policing of the state is in direct proportion to that people's abiliity to be self-sufficient, that's why controlling the land is so important to states, but the same logic applies in every part of our lives: food, work, housing, community, public space access, HEALTHCARE

So

Writing a constitution for your trans assembly doesn't have to mean policing the space and it absolutely must not mean that everyone who enters aligns perfectly with the constitution and is ideologically pure. Purity is the antechamber of fascism. Writing a constitution for the organisational structure of an assembly means figuring out core values and processes. It means that the people who come into your space can depend on the space to operate in the ways that you have laid out and for there to be clear expectations for their behaviour in the space, without being rules to access the assembly.

For example your assembly might be a sober space, and that doesn't have to mean that you're turning away trans people at the door because they smoked a joint on the way, but it means that the assurance of no ongoing drug use at the event makes it a safe place for people in recovery to attend and have their voices heard. You can create structure and assume the temporary responsibility of that structure to facilitate the assembly without ingraining power or authority over others, and such power that you do wield is mitigated by explicitly communicating your values and org processes.

For example, outlining conflict resolution values and processes doesn't mean that you will act as a community resolution service, it means that if anyone has problems with someone taking the mic at the assembly there is a clear framework through which they can take issue and if someone is allowed to speak at the assembly it means that your organisation is satisfied that any issues are resolved, or you're indifferent, or whatever stance you've taken in your constitution, but not that you're "platforming" or supporting someone that someone's friends don't like. Explciit frameworks and structure allow distancing from the interpersonal in this way.

Structures emerging from assemblies are going to be born out of people authentically discussing the issues that affect them rather than an abstracted group (even if they're a group within a marginalised community) taking on the responsibility to be the architects of liberation, which has various advantages. For one, the paternalism of radicals is often hard to spot from the inside, but the way that activists and more politicised members of a group take on the responsibility to be the ones making it all happen is a huge stunting force against anything actually happening because of the distinction and therefore alienation being made between the politicised and non-politicised community members (this is why it's good to offer free food at your assembly and anything else that can give it a bit more social pull). Structures born out of assemblies benefit from the insights of "ordinary" non-politicised community members which are frequently free of the prefigurative political frameworks the politicised members will apply that can make opportunities for organising slip through the cracks. At the same time, the politicisation of those non-politicised members is a huge part of the aim and itself a huge benefit of giving people a space for discussion. The structures that will come out of a democratic assembly to tackle the problems discussed therein will comprise new and old organisers who are all invested in getting something done in a way that a recruit to an org set up by politicised actors to tackle a problem won't.

The opportunities for solidarity abound too. Many trans people have experiences with sex work and are currently sex workers. Many radical trans people don't or aren't, because a lot of radicals come from comfortable positions that have kept them away from the economic pressures trans people experience to do sex work (be it survival or for example saving for surgery). A trans assembly is more well-equipped to produce a structure to support and protect trans sex workers than the radical politicised factions of either trans or sex worker communities. Furthermore, someone with experience in creating and maintaining a community democratic space like this is well-equipped to cross into another community and help to create one like it there, at which point you could even convene to discuss community solidarity with the full force of both assemblies.

Consciousness raising is a fantastic thing for the organisers of an assembly to approach that doesn't risk calcifying power in community positions too. Some amount of consciousness raising is the natural result of holding an assembly, but you can take proactive steps too. If the organisers who facilitate the assembly also facilitate a reading group (maybe right afterwards for those who want to stick around, or maybe not if that would be too tiring) there is immediately a direct route for the politicisation of community members through a social avenue, and you're not positioning yourselves as teachers or big brain theory geniuses, you're learning together.

The job of leaders is to make more leaders, and creating a space for people to learn how to organise by giving them the practical experience of democracy is the most empowering thing that we can do to start to solve our problems. We will win this fight with robust community structures. The protests will go on, the farce of electoralism will go on, but the struggle is where the real politics is happening.

It is essential for the coming decades that we answer the questions of organising in communities where everyone is suffering. These are the most pressing questions of the next 50 years.

One of the first answers is to escape the trauma response mindset that gives us a sense of a foreshortened future and learn to breathe, think more slowly and make structures built to help our communities far into the future. You aren't building a lifeboat to make it through the storm, you're building a sustainable life on your island, knowing that survivors will wash upon your shores daily and when they do your island will get that little bit bigger and that little bit more beautiful.

Writing this up into a proper thing and putting it as a public post on my patreon because I realised people without tumblr simply can't access it properly

I've put it up as a public patreon post now, expanded with a little more on assemblies but largely the same as above

The Cass Review, and what we can do about it

The UK government is making decisive moves toward banning trans healthcare outright. The NHS says it is adjusting its policies to be in line with the "cass report", a pseudoscientific report written by a transphobe that goes as far as to claim that little boys playing with trucks and little girls playing with dolls is biological, and which disregards dozens of scientifically sound previous studies into HRT and trans healthcare in order to reach its conclusions that trans healthcare for under 25s should be effectively eliminated.

This is genocidal. These moves will kill countless young trans people. I would not have made it to 25 if healthcare wasn't available and I know so many other trans people wouldn't have either.

The mainstream reporting in the UK is keeping itself ideologically cohesive by claiming that trans people exist, nobody hates them, and they're very rare, and the big problem is the explosion of new cases of not-really-trans people who are clogging up the system (this is a lie, the system has been intentionally slowed by malicious neglect, it isn't even a resource issue, the clinics have far more capacity than the number of patients who are let through)

Once again, this is genocidal and is actually a commonplace methodology of genocide. The nazis asked GRT people to help them understand which Traveller families were "real" travellers and which were the fake ones, since they insisted it was only the fake ones who were the problem and who had to be exterminated (because a lot of nazi GRT policy was based on American indigenous reservation policy).

Labour, the main opposiiton party in the UK, has announced it will "follow the Cass Report", and implement these restrictions on trans healthcare once in government.

For the survival of young trans people, robust community structures must be developed immediately.

Efforts to change the electoral situation will proceed at a snail's pace and will be entirely at the whims of what is politically expedient. It will turn around, but it will take a long time. At the voting level, everyone in the UK who cares about trans people needs to make it clear that they won't vote for Labour unless they reverse position on this, and to be clear about this: Labour will not listen. They are PR Brained Psychopaths and they don't want to get into this "controversial" issue in a way that might cost them further popularity and the easy election win.

Wes Streeting, inhuman lab experiment and Labour Shadow Health Secretary has said that activists need to "stop protesting to ask us to be better opposition and start protesting to ask us to be better government", in other words their electoral promises are cynical reactionary bargains and deals to get them into power and the only point at which they will change anything is once they are in government, if at all. I know this sounds very "push Biden left" but I'm not saying give up now - to repeat, everyone who cares about trans people in the UK should tell Labour to get fucked right away, and then keep doing it as loudly as possible, but it's just not going to change until after the general election at least.

Another way to help could be through legal routes, like the work that The Good Law Project has been doing for trans people for several years now, but I don't know enough about the law to know if it can be used to challenge this at all.

We have to accept there is no electoral solution right now to this genocidal campaign against trans people in the UK, and while those efforts are ongoing trans people and cis allies need to fucking organise. Trans exclusive / separatist organising is riddled with issues, I don't want to cast hopelessness around but there are really very few of us and while it's absolutely necessary to privilege trans voices in trans organising and give us the deciding power and the autonomy, we need to utilise the support and time and labour of every cis person who is willing to help in whatever way they can.

Robust community structures means community structures that are helping young trans people get healthcare as an absolute basic starting point, but it means a lot more than that besides. We need community structures that are consciously organised by people who are taking responsibility for the community roles they are in and being completely explicit with each other about the nature and function of their organising. We need HRT community resources so young trans people can survive this medical segregation, we need drug user harm reduction spaces so that what people turn to in despair doesn't kill them, we need sober spaces so that people can get away from unhealthy coping responses, we need conflict resolution structures so that our problems are dealt with privately and nobody is left completely isolated, but more than any of those things, and in order to have all of those things, we desperately need trans assemblies

Assemblies are how we will get a community of robust radical organisers, because only by repeatedly practicing the ongoing process of democracy can people learn how to do it in a way that will facilitate their own organising. We have to empower the whole community to answer our own questions, come up with solutions, organise people into structures to enact those solutions and then do them. All this means is that an open door event convenes frequently (at least fortnightly) to discuss what is happening in the community. Trans people get the mic for allotted time, and discuss the issues, and then whatever voting structure the assembly uses facilitates further discussion, for example through working groups - the assembly breaks into smaller groups to discuss the topic and then representatives report the outcomes of those discussions back and consensus is reached from what the representatives report.

We have to get people engaging in this process because in order to effectively combat this situation trans people must agree on the solutions and then tell cis allies how to help and so far we haven't been doing that. We really really haven't been. But we could be with a little work. And as I'm saying, doing this will also empower everyone in the community to organise toward specific solutions for specific issues like HRT provision, sober spaces, housing, food, etc.

fuck

I'll have more to add to this post later I have to get to therapy I just got really mad when I saw the news this morning

Okay I'm back. Therapy went well thanks for asking

I want to preempt here the thoughts that I know it's easy to have when this stuff feels overwhelming, that community organising "isn't enough" or it's too small to make the necessary change.

One of the ways that states maintain asymmetry in conflict with marginalised people is the dependence that the community has on resources the state controls. In concert with capitalism, the modern neoliberal state has disempowered and aliented individuals to a point where so much of the basics of survival and feeling like a human being feel out of our hands, and as soon as you start even just sharing regular meals with people that you're in community with you feel infinitely freer. But I'm not talking about food, I'm talking about healthcare.

Controlling the entire supply and distribution chain of HRT is how the state is able to say with such ease and swiftness that trans people can't have it. The power to reverse that is in the hands of the trans community and cis allies, if they simply begin to build community structures. The advantage of the state disappears, the independence and autonomy of the community materialises. The ability to meaningfully negotiate how any group of people engage with, delegate responsibility to, and consent to the power and policing of the state is in direct proportion to that people's abiliity to be self-sufficient, that's why controlling the land is so important to states, but the same logic applies in every part of our lives: food, work, housing, community, public space access, HEALTHCARE

So

Writing a constitution for your trans assembly doesn't have to mean policing the space and it absolutely must not mean that everyone who enters aligns perfectly with the constitution and is ideologically pure. Purity is the antechamber of fascism. Writing a constitution for the organisational structure of an assembly means figuring out core values and processes. It means that the people who come into your space can depend on the space to operate in the ways that you have laid out and for there to be clear expectations for their behaviour in the space, without being rules to access the assembly.

For example your assembly might be a sober space, and that doesn't have to mean that you're turning away trans people at the door because they smoked a joint on the way, but it means that the assurance of no ongoing drug use at the event makes it a safe place for people in recovery to attend and have their voices heard. You can create structure and assume the temporary responsibility of that structure to facilitate the assembly without ingraining power or authority over others, and such power that you do wield is mitigated by explicitly communicating your values and org processes.

For example, outlining conflict resolution values and processes doesn't mean that you will act as a community resolution service, it means that if anyone has problems with someone taking the mic at the assembly there is a clear framework through which they can take issue and if someone is allowed to speak at the assembly it means that your organisation is satisfied that any issues are resolved, or you're indifferent, or whatever stance you've taken in your constitution, but not that you're "platforming" or supporting someone that someone's friends don't like. Explciit frameworks and structure allow distancing from the interpersonal in this way.

Structures emerging from assemblies are going to be born out of people authentically discussing the issues that affect them rather than an abstracted group (even if they're a group within a marginalised community) taking on the responsibility to be the architects of liberation, which has various advantages. For one, the paternalism of radicals is often hard to spot from the inside, but the way that activists and more politicised members of a group take on the responsibility to be the ones making it all happen is a huge stunting force against anything actually happening because of the distinction and therefore alienation being made between the politicised and non-politicised community members (this is why it's good to offer free food at your assembly and anything else that can give it a bit more social pull). Structures born out of assemblies benefit from the insights of "ordinary" non-politicised community members which are frequently free of the prefigurative political frameworks the politicised members will apply that can make opportunities for organising slip through the cracks. At the same time, the politicisation of those non-politicised members is a huge part of the aim and itself a huge benefit of giving people a space for discussion. The structures that will come out of a democratic assembly to tackle the problems discussed therein will comprise new and old organisers who are all invested in getting something done in a way that a recruit to an org set up by politicised actors to tackle a problem won't.

The opportunities for solidarity abound too. Many trans people have experiences with sex work and are currently sex workers. Many radical trans people don't or aren't, because a lot of radicals come from comfortable positions that have kept them away from the economic pressures trans people experience to do sex work (be it survival or for example saving for surgery). A trans assembly is more well-equipped to produce a structure to support and protect trans sex workers than the radical politicised factions of either trans or sex worker communities. Furthermore, someone with experience in creating and maintaining a community democratic space like this is well-equipped to cross into another community and help to create one like it there, at which point you could even convene to discuss community solidarity with the full force of both assemblies.

Consciousness raising is a fantastic thing for the organisers of an assembly to approach that doesn't risk calcifying power in community positions too. Some amount of consciousness raising is the natural result of holding an assembly, but you can take proactive steps too. If the organisers who facilitate the assembly also facilitate a reading group (maybe right afterwards for those who want to stick around, or maybe not if that would be too tiring) there is immediately a direct route for the politicisation of community members through a social avenue, and you're not positioning yourselves as teachers or big brain theory geniuses, you're learning together.

The job of leaders is to make more leaders, and creating a space for people to learn how to organise by giving them the practical experience of democracy is the most empowering thing that we can do to start to solve our problems. We will win this fight with robust community structures. The protests will go on, the farce of electoralism will go on, but the struggle is where the real politics is happening.

It is essential for the coming decades that we answer the questions of organising in communities where everyone is suffering. These are the most pressing questions of the next 50 years.

One of the first answers is to escape the trauma response mindset that gives us a sense of a foreshortened future and learn to breathe, think more slowly and make structures built to help our communities far into the future. You aren't building a lifeboat to make it through the storm, you're building a sustainable life on your island, knowing that survivors will wash upon your shores daily and when they do your island will get that little bit bigger and that little bit more beautiful.

Melissa Harris-Perry, Black Female Voices: Who Is Listening?

I love this talk; watched and live tweeted it when it happened. Also, Melissa Harris-Perry’s succinct definition of victim blaming is the one that I regularly use. Love how she explains how this impacts the politics of respectability.

The Cass Review, and what we can do about it

The UK government is making decisive moves toward banning trans healthcare outright. The NHS says it is adjusting its policies to be in line with the "cass report", a pseudoscientific report written by a transphobe that goes as far as to claim that little boys playing with trucks and little girls playing with dolls is biological, and which disregards dozens of scientifically sound previous studies into HRT and trans healthcare in order to reach its conclusions that trans healthcare for under 25s should be effectively eliminated.

This is genocidal. These moves will kill countless young trans people. I would not have made it to 25 if healthcare wasn't available and I know so many other trans people wouldn't have either.

The mainstream reporting in the UK is keeping itself ideologically cohesive by claiming that trans people exist, nobody hates them, and they're very rare, and the big problem is the explosion of new cases of not-really-trans people who are clogging up the system (this is a lie, the system has been intentionally slowed by malicious neglect, it isn't even a resource issue, the clinics have far more capacity than the number of patients who are let through)

Once again, this is genocidal and is actually a commonplace methodology of genocide. The nazis asked GRT people to help them understand which Traveller families were "real" travellers and which were the fake ones, since they insisted it was only the fake ones who were the problem and who had to be exterminated (because a lot of nazi GRT policy was based on American indigenous reservation policy).

Labour, the main opposiiton party in the UK, has announced it will "follow the Cass Report", and implement these restrictions on trans healthcare once in government.

For the survival of young trans people, robust community structures must be developed immediately.

Efforts to change the electoral situation will proceed at a snail's pace and will be entirely at the whims of what is politically expedient. It will turn around, but it will take a long time. At the voting level, everyone in the UK who cares about trans people needs to make it clear that they won't vote for Labour unless they reverse position on this, and to be clear about this: Labour will not listen. They are PR Brained Psychopaths and they don't want to get into this "controversial" issue in a way that might cost them further popularity and the easy election win.

Wes Streeting, inhuman lab experiment and Labour Shadow Health Secretary has said that activists need to "stop protesting to ask us to be better opposition and start protesting to ask us to be better government", in other words their electoral promises are cynical reactionary bargains and deals to get them into power and the only point at which they will change anything is once they are in government, if at all. I know this sounds very "push Biden left" but I'm not saying give up now - to repeat, everyone who cares about trans people in the UK should tell Labour to get fucked right away, and then keep doing it as loudly as possible, but it's just not going to change until after the general election at least.

Another way to help could be through legal routes, like the work that The Good Law Project has been doing for trans people for several years now, but I don't know enough about the law to know if it can be used to challenge this at all.

We have to accept there is no electoral solution right now to this genocidal campaign against trans people in the UK, and while those efforts are ongoing trans people and cis allies need to fucking organise. Trans exclusive / separatist organising is riddled with issues, I don't want to cast hopelessness around but there are really very few of us and while it's absolutely necessary to privilege trans voices in trans organising and give us the deciding power and the autonomy, we need to utilise the support and time and labour of every cis person who is willing to help in whatever way they can.

Robust community structures means community structures that are helping young trans people get healthcare as an absolute basic starting point, but it means a lot more than that besides. We need community structures that are consciously organised by people who are taking responsibility for the community roles they are in and being completely explicit with each other about the nature and function of their organising. We need HRT community resources so young trans people can survive this medical segregation, we need drug user harm reduction spaces so that what people turn to in despair doesn't kill them, we need sober spaces so that people can get away from unhealthy coping responses, we need conflict resolution structures so that our problems are dealt with privately and nobody is left completely isolated, but more than any of those things, and in order to have all of those things, we desperately need trans assemblies

Assemblies are how we will get a community of robust radical organisers, because only by repeatedly practicing the ongoing process of democracy can people learn how to do it in a way that will facilitate their own organising. We have to empower the whole community to answer our own questions, come up with solutions, organise people into structures to enact those solutions and then do them. All this means is that an open door event convenes frequently (at least fortnightly) to discuss what is happening in the community. Trans people get the mic for allotted time, and discuss the issues, and then whatever voting structure the assembly uses facilitates further discussion, for example through working groups - the assembly breaks into smaller groups to discuss the topic and then representatives report the outcomes of those discussions back and consensus is reached from what the representatives report.

We have to get people engaging in this process because in order to effectively combat this situation trans people must agree on the solutions and then tell cis allies how to help and so far we haven't been doing that. We really really haven't been. But we could be with a little work. And as I'm saying, doing this will also empower everyone in the community to organise toward specific solutions for specific issues like HRT provision, sober spaces, housing, food, etc.

fuck

I'll have more to add to this post later I have to get to therapy I just got really mad when I saw the news this morning

Okay I'm back. Therapy went well thanks for asking

I want to preempt here the thoughts that I know it's easy to have when this stuff feels overwhelming, that community organising "isn't enough" or it's too small to make the necessary change.

One of the ways that states maintain asymmetry in conflict with marginalised people is the dependence that the community has on resources the state controls. In concert with capitalism, the modern neoliberal state has disempowered and aliented individuals to a point where so much of the basics of survival and feeling like a human being feel out of our hands, and as soon as you start even just sharing regular meals with people that you're in community with you feel infinitely freer. But I'm not talking about food, I'm talking about healthcare.

Controlling the entire supply and distribution chain of HRT is how the state is able to say with such ease and swiftness that trans people can't have it. The power to reverse that is in the hands of the trans community and cis allies, if they simply begin to build community structures. The advantage of the state disappears, the independence and autonomy of the community materialises. The ability to meaningfully negotiate how any group of people engage with, delegate responsibility to, and consent to the power and policing of the state is in direct proportion to that people's abiliity to be self-sufficient, that's why controlling the land is so important to states, but the same logic applies in every part of our lives: food, work, housing, community, public space access, HEALTHCARE

So

Writing a constitution for your trans assembly doesn't have to mean policing the space and it absolutely must not mean that everyone who enters aligns perfectly with the constitution and is ideologically pure. Purity is the antechamber of fascism. Writing a constitution for the organisational structure of an assembly means figuring out core values and processes. It means that the people who come into your space can depend on the space to operate in the ways that you have laid out and for there to be clear expectations for their behaviour in the space, without being rules to access the assembly.

For example your assembly might be a sober space, and that doesn't have to mean that you're turning away trans people at the door because they smoked a joint on the way, but it means that the assurance of no ongoing drug use at the event makes it a safe place for people in recovery to attend and have their voices heard. You can create structure and assume the temporary responsibility of that structure to facilitate the assembly without ingraining power or authority over others, and such power that you do wield is mitigated by explicitly communicating your values and org processes.

For example, outlining conflict resolution values and processes doesn't mean that you will act as a community resolution service, it means that if anyone has problems with someone taking the mic at the assembly there is a clear framework through which they can take issue and if someone is allowed to speak at the assembly it means that your organisation is satisfied that any issues are resolved, or you're indifferent, or whatever stance you've taken in your constitution, but not that you're "platforming" or supporting someone that someone's friends don't like. Explciit frameworks and structure allow distancing from the interpersonal in this way.

Structures emerging from assemblies are going to be born out of people authentically discussing the issues that affect them rather than an abstracted group (even if they're a group within a marginalised community) taking on the responsibility to be the architects of liberation, which has various advantages. For one, the paternalism of radicals is often hard to spot from the inside, but the way that activists and more politicised members of a group take on the responsibility to be the ones making it all happen is a huge stunting force against anything actually happening because of the distinction and therefore alienation being made between the politicised and non-politicised community members (this is why it's good to offer free food at your assembly and anything else that can give it a bit more social pull). Structures born out of assemblies benefit from the insights of "ordinary" non-politicised community members which are frequently free of the prefigurative political frameworks the politicised members will apply that can make opportunities for organising slip through the cracks. At the same time, the politicisation of those non-politicised members is a huge part of the aim and itself a huge benefit of giving people a space for discussion. The structures that will come out of a democratic assembly to tackle the problems discussed therein will comprise new and old organisers who are all invested in getting something done in a way that a recruit to an org set up by politicised actors to tackle a problem won't.

The opportunities for solidarity abound too. Many trans people have experiences with sex work and are currently sex workers. Many radical trans people don't or aren't, because a lot of radicals come from comfortable positions that have kept them away from the economic pressures trans people experience to do sex work (be it survival or for example saving for surgery). A trans assembly is more well-equipped to produce a structure to support and protect trans sex workers than the radical politicised factions of either trans or sex worker communities. Furthermore, someone with experience in creating and maintaining a community democratic space like this is well-equipped to cross into another community and help to create one like it there, at which point you could even convene to discuss community solidarity with the full force of both assemblies.

Consciousness raising is a fantastic thing for the organisers of an assembly to approach that doesn't risk calcifying power in community positions too. Some amount of consciousness raising is the natural result of holding an assembly, but you can take proactive steps too. If the organisers who facilitate the assembly also facilitate a reading group (maybe right afterwards for those who want to stick around, or maybe not if that would be too tiring) there is immediately a direct route for the politicisation of community members through a social avenue, and you're not positioning yourselves as teachers or big brain theory geniuses, you're learning together.

The job of leaders is to make more leaders, and creating a space for people to learn how to organise by giving them the practical experience of democracy is the most empowering thing that we can do to start to solve our problems. We will win this fight with robust community structures. The protests will go on, the farce of electoralism will go on, but the struggle is where the real politics is happening.

It is essential for the coming decades that we answer the questions of organising in communities where everyone is suffering. These are the most pressing questions of the next 50 years.

One of the first answers is to escape the trauma response mindset that gives us a sense of a foreshortened future and learn to breathe, think more slowly and make structures built to help our communities far into the future. You aren't building a lifeboat to make it through the storm, you're building a sustainable life on your island, knowing that survivors will wash upon your shores daily and when they do your island will get that little bit bigger and that little bit more beautiful.

Mobilising and organising

I think about this a lot. Kwame Ture said that the difference between mobilising and organising should be properly understood. A protest, march, or rally is mobilising, but it is organising that we need to make real change. To be a good organiser you have to be a good mobiliser, but not all good mobilisers are good organisers. Ture's contrasting examples are Malcolm X (organiser) and MLK (mobiliser) - he says "everywhere that Malcolm went he left a mosque".

Ture also says "sometimes the enemy uses mobilisation to immobilise us!" People easily mobilise around issues, but this doesn't create change. Think of how many well attended massive marches and protests came together the same day as something horrible hit the news, and how often they change nothing fundamentally. People don't mobilise to address fundamental injustice in the same way, or every prison would be dismantled already, every border erased, classes abolished and marginalised peoples liberated. For that, we have to organise.

The Internet, and here I'm largely talking about social media, is constantly used to mobilise, but very rarely used to organise. We use social media to get people to come to protests, we share gofundmes, we hold fundraiser streams. We need to use the Internet to organise, not just to mobilise, and to do that I don't mean that we need to have discord servers for our local antifascist blocs, i mean we need to devise new ways to use the Internet as organisational infrastructure.

On Red Planet we interview organisers every week so that our show serves as a promotional opportunity for orgs and the archives of our episodes double as an educational resource for aspiring organisers. At the same time we bring the conversation back to always keep our eyes on the prize: dual power. How does whatever we're discussing relate back to the construction of a socialist relation between the working class? How can this help people stop deferring responsibility to the state and get them relying on their neighbours instead?

All that is a start, but there's still more we in the online left can do. Black Socialists of America started a map of mutual aid orgs internationally so that people can quickly find orgs near them. That's a great example of building infrastructure to enable the knitting together of a new social fabric.

The American christofascist right wing is engineering a genocide of trans people and through the restriction of bodily autonomy increasingly pushing for the enslavement of women. We won't stop that with fundraiser streams. They will be a part of the fight back, but we need to develop tools that allow more meaningful resistance and allow us to organise to challenge injustice fundamentally.

We need the Internet to be full of these kinds of tools, because the Internet is a beautiful opportunity to do to organising what it's done for so many other social processes, but first we have to stop letting mobilisation immobilise us.

actually white westerners talk all the time about how there are too many ‘bullies’ in their imagined, but still largely liberal, ‘social justice community’.

consider. the ‘leftists’ being pests in your computer programs & making callout posts about twitch streamers are no more working towards total liberation than your average young republican. their inefficacy often means that their thoughts and actions are simply not worth lengthy discussion, and as it turns out, there are ‘bullies’ and unwelcome behavior within every political tendency.

but good news, those truly working towards liberation (work that involves securing food, water, shelter, medicine, and educational materials in their own communities) can often be found in more formal socialist organizations, (including groups they create themselves, with the help of friends, peers, and neighbors). ideally, within these groups, when genuine bullying/or unwanted behavior occurs, empowered members working towards a common, well-defined goal can choose the best course of action to directly address the problem. if the issue is irreconcilable, separate groups are often formed, and the work continues.

tldr; the online ‘leftist’ bullies do not seek to build the same future as you, and even where they do, their ineffectiveness proves their own irrelevance. so, let’s not waste time on nebulous leftist meta-analysis. get the people you want to work with organized, and start building the world you want to see.

also important to add: this is not ‘touch grass’ style criticism. online spaces are real life, and for those who rely heavily upon these spaces for social interaction, some of these behaviors can truly be harmful.

my point is that, in regards to effective political action, the activities that help us reach shared goals (a number of which can be done virtually) are clearly not on the to-do lists of virtual bullies. so instead of spending time psychoanalyzing them, we should focus our limited resources on accomplishing what we know will move us forward.

The first Earth Day was held in 1970.

“At the time, rivers were on fire and birds were dying off en masse due to air and water pollution. Other big issues were at play, too: Vietnam was tearing people apart, and events like the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the Stonewall Riot had inflamed cultural divides and kept the public on edge. Despite that, 10 percent of the U.S. population took to the streets and protested the destruction of the environment on that first Earth Day.

[…] Change wasn’t immediate […] But in the following months, [Denis Hayes] and other activists founded the Earth Day Network, targeted specific politicians and policies, and spearheaded a wide-ranging letter-writing campaign. Within the next few years, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act, and established the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a host of other protective measures.”

All change, particularly large-scale societal and political change, seems impossible until somebody does it. But it has happened before, and it can (and will) happen again.

Abortion rights are under attack, and it’s time to fight back.

If you think this is just about Texas or ‘red’ states, you’re wrong. Attacks on abortion anywhere are a threat to our rights everywhere. Today Texas’ SB8 takes effect. This dangerous and extreme law bans abortion as early as six weeks (way before most people even know they’re pregnant) and includes an unprecedent provision that allows private individuals - including anti-abortion protestors - to file lawsuits enforcing the bans. There’s even a monetary reward - up to $10,000 - for successful lawsuits. There have been over 90 abortion restrictions enacted this year alone - more than any year since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. It’s time to raise the alarm - keep #bansoffourbodies. What can you do? Follow and donate to: West Fund, @BuckleBunniesFundTX (Instagram & Twitter), Jane’s Due Process, The Bridge Collective ATX, Fund Texas Choice, @LaFronteraFund (on Twitter), Texas Equal Access Fund - TEA Fund, The Lilith Fund for Reproductive Equity, Clinic Access Support Network & The Afiya Center.Sending love and access to all Texans.

aggressivelybicaptainamerica replied to your post: By the way, Kroger is a vast and multi-headed…

To be fair, I think that boycotts can be and remain productive from a labor activism perspective, even in this day and age. It’s not incidental that Lyft debuted its IPO lower than expected after its drivers went on strike and asked riders to boycott in support. Amazon was phased by the 2018 Prime Day boycotts, and if you want to burrow down to the local or state level the examples multiply drastically. However, the key to a successful and impactful boycott, whether at the local or national level, is absolutely an organized, united movement, which hopefully is drawing on the expertise of people who have seen and done it (ie, labor activism) before. The reason the Lyft boycott was so successful is because local drivers formed and joined organizations representing their interests: Rideshare Drivers United in LA, Chicago Rideshare Activists, New York’s Independent Drivers Guild. They timed the boycott deliberately for when it would impact the company’s interests the most. And its not like Kroger or any similar corporation just shrugs when it starts losing local market shares. As Patriot Act pointed out in its piece on municipal broadband, national million-dollar companies are absolutely spooked when local folks take concrete action against them—but it requires more than one person deciding not to patronize that company anymore. It takes collective effort, and judicious application of the activist toolbox history has given us. Someone on this site wrote a post about how you don’t just wake up one morning knowing how to organize a protest or found a coalition; these are appreciable skills you attain by working in the space. Similarly, boycotts can be useful, but only when we work in the context of a larger group, one that’s hopefully consulted with some people who understand how that mechanism of countervailing power works.

After all, pretty significant part of organized labor is the organized part.