It's Actually Fine For Trans People To Say "when I Was A Boy" Or "when I Was A Girl" In Reference To

now say it with me: authors/artists dont owe you moral purity. an author/artist job is not to hold you by the hand & tell you exactly what is Good™ & what is Bad™. you should be able to think for yourself

Resources for Mending Clothes

We toss out over 80 pounds of textiles each year. These textiles are often made of plastic materials (polyester, nylon), made in unethical conditions, dyed with harsh dyes that often get put into the rivers, etc. Even a single cotton shirt releases carbon emissions and uses tons of water. 

So the best thing to prevent the unsustainable growth of the fashion industry is to make sure that your clothing lasts as long as possible. To do so, mending clothing is a must. So here are some resources to help you learn how to do various things, such as sewing a button, to tailoring clothes, or even upcycling old clothing into new styles. 

* How to sew on three different types of button

* How to hand sew on a patch on a torn pair of jeans

* How to sew up a hole in an old shirt

* How to sew a simple T-shirt

* How to upcycle old clothing into new clothing

* More upcycle and sewing techniques

* How to repair a damaged sock

* How to do an invisible stitch

* 3 different stitches to work with for different results

* How to make a T-shirt smaller so it fits you better

* How to make repairs to your shoes

These are just a few of the things that you can do in order to make sure that your clothing lasts for a long time. Nobody wants to keep buying new clothing, as it is expensive and wasteful. 

So making alterations to your clothing, or fixing small holes hen you see them can be hugely beneficial to your wallet, to garment workers, and to the environment in the long term. 

Making this a separate post: It's super super important that we keep our activist work focussed on Palestine after the ceasefire. On the food aid, on the prisoner releases, on the reconstruction of essential services and the reconstruction as a whole, on the free travel of journalists and researchers to document the genocide, on the human rights and land rights of Palestinians, on the new political conditions, on BSD and on continued pressure on Israel and it's collaborators, on the West Bank, and more.

From Naomi Klein's Doppelganger about 2009:

We met Mona Al Shawa, a Palestinian women’s rights activist, who told me, “We had more hope during the attacks; at least then we believed things would change.” Now, she said, outside attention had moved on and Gazans once again felt abandoned by the world. The idea that there was more hope when they were under active air assault still haunts me.

We can not abandon Palestine. This time has to be different.

I've been reading some more of the works of eugenicists while thinking about the state of education about this ideology. Yes, "Eugenics" is a dirty word nowadays; in my opinion, it's not nearly dirty enough.

Here's a fact to make your head spin: Eugenics wasn't about killing people. Yes, it ended up killing people, and if you examine the way eugenics has influenced the world, you realize it still does kill people, but the architects of eugenics weren't leading with, "My fellow countrymen, we should On Purpose Kill People."

The reason that's important is, people keep coming up with ideas labeled (by their critics) "uncomfortably similar to eugenics"--- ideas for a compassionate, scientifically-grounded way of improving humanity by understanding the heredity of good and bad traits and influencing the fertility rates of people with different genetic traits.

There is already a word for this kind of idea. That word is: eugenics. It is silly to set yourself apart from eugenicists by explicitly repudiating killing people or forcibly sterilizing them, when many founding eugenicists also explicitly repudiated killing people or forcibly sterilizing them.

Here is an Internet Archive link to "Heredity in relation to eugenics," a work by Charles Benedict Davenport, an early eugenicist. Please read at least the first four pages.

I'm afraid that his brief introduction to eugenics could sound, to the layperson, surprisingly less scary and disgusting than expected. Mister Davenport's word choices may provide a "red flag" to the reader: he refers to human babies as a "valuable crop," to marriage between people as "mating." The disquiet these word choices cause is because they dehumanize the subjects. Humans, from Davenport's perspective, are essentially the same as agricultural plants or animals, which in turn are assets, sources of economic gain---they are things.

Davenport articulates the contribution of a human being to the United States: "...forming a united, altruistic, God-serving, law-abiding, effective and productive nation." However, relatively few people are "fully effective" at this purpose, because a proportion of society is "non-productive"---either criminals or disabled, or among the people required to care for and control criminals and the disabled.

After you read the introduction of Davenport's book, read his wikipedia page. He was a Nazi. He was a Nazi until the day he died. He was rabidly and repugnantly racist, so much so that his later scientific works fudged together garbage conclusions that contradicted his actual data in order to prop up his racist beliefs. He lobbied Congress to restrict immigration into the USA, out of the belief that the immigrants would poison the blood of our country with inferior genetics.

Overwhelmingly, eugenicists were concerned with disability. They believed that disability would normally be eliminated by natural selection, and that caring for the disabled and allowing them to grow up and to have children would cause a steady increase in the proportion of society made up of disabled people---who were, as Davenport puts it, a "burden" on society.

Eugenicists were also concerned with race. They wanted to gather data that demonstrated what they already believed: that race was a biological reality, a reality that could only appear unclear or malleable because of harmful, aberrant, unnatural scenarios, namely miscegenation or race mixing. Basically, race was both a natural reality, and in need of enforcement.

But eugenicist ideology was not just about the inferiority of disabled people or people of color. Eugenicists thought of their ideas as a science and thought of themselves as scientists, and they broadly addressed virtually everything we would now consider a matter of "public health." Eugenicist writings almost universally address crime, and often don't recognize a clear distinction between crime and mental disability, or between either of those things and poverty. Criminals, disabled people and poor people were basically the same; they had something wrong with their genes that made them that way.

"Sexual deviance" is generally included in this, and Davenport explicitly references this in his introduction, where he says that "normal" people are not likely to have the kind of sex that leads to the transmission of STIs.

For many proponents (including Davenport), the key dogma of eugenics was that genes predetermined everything about a person. Tuberculosis was a huge problem at the time, and eugenicists were insisting that, although the disease was known to be bacterial, susceptibility to the disease was genetic, and therefore people who became sick with tuberculosis were genetically defective. Likewise if a child developed epilepsy after a head injury, the injury did not cause the epilepsy but instead revealed an inherent genetic weakness that was already there. This implied that spending resources on healing or rehabilitating anybody was a waste of time.

If you read more of Davenport's book, you will see that he makes some WILD statements---he asserts that artistic talent is a Mendelian trait controlled by a single gene, basically that you are either born an artist or you aren't. This seems absolutely absurd but, there is a good amount of popular belief in inherent aptitudes for art or music or math or what have you.

Eugenics isn't just about named prejudices like racism or ableism, it is even bigger than that, it is a set of beliefs encompassing how the potential and value of human beings is determined and how society should care for its members as a result of that.

“Bondi has now made public statements assessing the facts and the law of the Signal case while resisting calls for an investigation. These are simply astounding actions by a sitting attorney general. “The Justice Department’s approach thus far stands in contrast with its customary role of examining serious national-security breaches,” the WSJ reported in the most understated possible way. The abiding concern all along has been that Trump would place loyalists at the Justice Department in part to protect himself and his administration from legal consequences for their wrongdoing – a permanent coverup mechanism to ignore, bury, and disregard executive branch lawlessness. Pam Bondi is eagerly filling the role of a loyalist attorney general. This is what it looks like.”

— Pam Bondi Takes Point On Covering Up Trump’s Signal Fiasco

and it's not even about keeping people “dumb” as it is about keeping people functionally illiterate. if they can barely read, they won't read those naughty books that might make them question the reality handed down to them. they won't have any historical context for the situation they are in or any knowledge of the struggles and victories that followed.

they won't read those books that cause the reader to feel empathy for somebody living a different walk of life from them. they won't read the policies of their chosen political parties or the statistical results of those policies or even the religious scripture in which they believe they're basing their decisions.

and if they can barely write, they will find it harder to transmit their own thoughts and ideas—even orally.

less literacy means people watch and listen to short sound bites and slogans and video clips over anything with depth or anything that brings context or nuance into the discussion. less literacy means creating a society of easy marks ready to be fooled, ready to be misled. less literacy means less ability to understand the scientific knowledge humanity has amassed and less ability to realize when they are being abused. less literacy means less imagination, lower attention spans, and lacking awareness.