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and the one that says ‘good night white pride’ but the halves are separated so if the top’s gone or covered it just says white pride

You know what no fuck it I’m tired of punks the swastika and the circle cross through it. Idc that it’s “fuck nazis” I still have to see the swastika. The point isn’t to make nazis angry its to fucking protect Jews, Roma and black people

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If you’re genuinely interested in learning more about settler colonialism and answering questions like “wait what does land back look like?” “What can I do?” and “What are the contexts informing this and why do Indigenous people reject being part of the US/Canada?” there are free syllabi online which can answer these questions (they will not answer it directly, the point is to get you to think for yourself and ask more questions that can lead you to thinking more deeply about this and how you can personally take action towards better practices of solidarity) 

Here’s the Standing Rock Syllabus: 

https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/

Allyship and Solidarity Guidelines of Unsettling America:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/allyship/

Towards Decolonization and Settler Responsibility:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/towards-decolonization-and-settler-responsibility-reflections-on-a-decade-of-indigenous-solidarity-organizing/

Sample Syllabi of the DEcolonization Resource Collection:

https://nationalhistorycenter.org/decolonization-resource-collection-sample-syllabi/

Further Readings:

https://decolonization.wordpress.com/decolonization-readings/

These are limited resources that mainly deal with North America and English-speaking countries, because that’s the context I am coming from. If you have resources from other regions and other languages, I welcome them here, or anything from your local context. 

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fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals.  protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.

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smoking mint leaves (actual leaves of mint)

cons: prolly shouldnt do that

pros: ur body feel all fresh and tingly like u washed ur insides

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Is fatness a risk factor for severe illness or death from COVID-19? 

Media and even some health agencies are warning that fatness is a risk factor for severe illness or death from COVID-19. That is some scary shit, especially when combined with the rampant medical discrimination that fat people already face and the threat of resource scarcity triggering “service rationing”.

However, this is not an accurate reflection of the science. 

Two smaller-scale studies from China identified “obesity” as a risk-factor. Yet those results may be based on incomplete health records of patients and they have not been reproduced among larger samples in other countries.

For example, @drjoshuawolrich on Instragram summarizes the results from a larger-scale UK study like this (images are his as well):

The latest report on COVID-19 from the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre in the UK is pretty conclusive. There is no evidence at present to suggest that BMI is a risk factor for admission to ICU with COVID-19 (n=672). ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Looking at the data graphically (swipe left on the post) you can see that the distribution of those admitted critically ill with COVID-19 (blue bars) follows the BMI distribution of the general population (orange line). BMI is not a risk factor.

Despite these findings, in their coverage of this exact study, The Guardian claimed that “Excess weight also appears to be a significant risk factor; over 70% of patients were overweight, obese or clinically obese on the body mass index scale.” 

(Of course, among the age groups represented in the study, roughly 70% of the population is overweight or obese to begin with in the UK, so it makes sense that we would also comprise a similar percentage of people hospitalized… but good to know you hate fat people)     

Some health agencies are also warning people with BMIs over 40 to take extra precautions and self-isolate. Why are they doing this when fatness is not a reliable risk factor? Perhaps because many of the risk factors that have been identified by the research are associated with higher weights, including older age and comorbidities like hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Of course, lots of fat people don’t have any of these conditions, and lots of thin people do. Weight is an invalid indicator of health. Maybe these health agencies think it is more efficient to stigmatize  scapegoat  warn fat people generally, rather than focusing on actual health indicators, which may be confusing to the general public. (I think you all know what I think about that strategy [insert fart noises]).

So what are the reliable risk factors for severe illness and death from COVID-19? To be frank, we don’t really know yet. As a recent editorial in the BMJ states: “As yet, there are no good data on how the risks associated with underlying comorbidities might vary in different population groups or settings.” 

In addition, I think we should all ask ourselves why we care about this information so much. In an ideal world, perhaps knowing the risk factors would allow us to offer the most supports to the people who (statistically) need it the most. But in reality, this kind of information is used to blame people for their own illnesses, to deny healthcare resources to people who “won’t benefit” from them, and to provide a false sense of security to those precious few who happen to have the “right” healthcare profile. Right now, at this moment, none of those things are helpful.

Breath deeply my friends. Protect one another. And tell the fat haters to fuck right off.

And if you need it: How to Survive COVID-19 Service Rationing (UK based)

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basically if youre in the place to educate yourself on these topics and you arent

a prison abolitionist,

a harm reductionist,

for decriminilization,

and giving the land back

i really do not think your assertions of “ACAB” or “be gay do crimes” or “revolution” hold much weight

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like notice that the widespread “destigmatization” of mental illness doesn’t seem to have helped slow its occurrence. in fact it mostly just birthed a bunch of new parasitic micro industries like self-care products and therapy and astrology apps that turn disorders into identity markers you sustain by buying shit, including medication 

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*shaves and puts on shapewear and some heels* ahh i feel so empowered! more empowered than before, actually! almost as though…. that power is denied to me in my natural state… and the power i can access most easily comes in the form of aestheticizing my body…. but wait… that means…… no!!!… no no no… surely not… i must be losing my mind………

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Yes I have a nightly routine it’s called being Insane in my room till I pass out

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new cg horse every day

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lmao

people on here really do use dsm labels like theyre buzzfeed quiz results and not insurance company billing codes lol

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i know you meant well when you said 30 isnt ancient, but im nb so my life expectancy is actually 30 :(

Hey anon, I’m so sorry that that’s a fear you’ve had to live with. I know that trans people are at greater risk of violence and suicide, and I’ve heard people say many times that the life expectancy of trans people (or trans women, or trans women of color, depending on who you ask) is anywhere from 23 to 35. Your ask troubled me, so I’ve dug deep looking for solid evidence of any of these, and I don’t believe that these statistics are true.

A trans woman, Helen, looked into the “23 years” claim and traced it back to someone’s notes on two workshops at a 2007 conference, which stated that trans people’s life expectancy is “believed to be around 23” (emphasis mine) but cites no actual source. This claim has been presented as fact in many news articles since then, but as far as I can tell, no one seems to know where this figure came from.

Another claim is often sourced to an Argentine psychologist quoted in this NPR article: 

Psychologist Graciela Balestra, who works closely with the transgender community, says it’s an especially vulnerable population.

“Transgender people have an average life expectancy of about 30 to 32 years,” Balestra says. “They don’t live any longer; I think that statistic alone says so much.”

But again, the article gives no source for this figure. 

I found an article claiming that a 2014 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) “concludes the average life expectancy of trans people in the Western Hemisphere is between 30-35 years.” However, when I tracked down the report, An Overview of Violence Against LGBTI Persons (pdf), its only reference to this is (emphasis mine): “[T]he IACHR has received information that the life expectancy of trans women in the Americas is between 30 and 35 years of age.” Again, this is no source.

Someone said on my post that these statistics may have come from the NCTE/NGLTF report Injustice at Every Turn (pdf), but I can’t find any reference to any such claim in the report.

Thinking about these claims, they seem unlikely for some basic reasons. Consider that we simply don’t have a long enough span of data on trans people, and that what data we do have is extremely limited because we can’t always know who is trans and who isn’t. Consider also that, although obviously the murder rates for trans people are extremely high, the number of deaths of 20-something trans people would have to be ENORMOUS to offset the existence of older trans people and bring the average down to 30. Especially since, unlike with racial groups for example, the data on trans people would likely include almost no childhood deaths, simply because it would be much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to identify these children as trans. And since we know that trans women of color are extremely disproportionately affected by violence, statistics that include white people and/or trans men would be especially unlikely to be so low.

And as to your specific situation anon, again given that trans women of color are most at risk, I don’t think we have reason to believe that being non-binary specifically puts a person at anywhere near this level of increased risk of dying young.

I don’t say any of this to question anyone’s experiences or to deny the state of emergency that trans women face with regard to violence. That is very real. But I think it can be harmful, even dangerous to trans people to spread claims like this around, especially without evidence. Expecting to die by 30 would take an extreme emotional toll on anyone, and trans people deserve better.

But don’t take my word for it: FORGE, a national transgender anti-violence organization that works with trans survivors of sexual assault, wrote the following in its 2016 publication “First Do No Harm: 8 Tips for AddressingViolence AgainstTransgender and GenderNon-Binary People” (pdf) (I have moved two footnotes into the main text and provided links to some endnote sources; italicized emphasis is theirs while bold is mine.): 

Promote Hopefor the Future

It certainly is not the same as a murder, but publicizing a low “life expectancy” rate for transwomen of color is another way to steal away their future, a “crime” that has been committed repeatedly by trans, LGBQ, and mainstream press. Think about the people you know or have heard of who have been diagnosed with a fatal illness and given a short time to live: how many of them have enrolled in college, undertaken lengthy training for a new occupation, had a new child, or tried to establish a new non-profit? A few do, certainly, but many more focus on their bucket list, arrange for their good-byes, or simply give up entirely, essentially relinquishing whatever time they have left to depression and regrets. When we tell transwomen of color they cannot expect to live very long, we rob them of hope. We rob them of any motivation to invest in themselves, their relationships, and their communities. We rob them, in short, of their lives even while they are still living. (This statement in no way negates the need to systemically work to improve and increase the life expectancy of trans people through working to end transphobia, racism, poverty, pervasive violence, and health and healthcare inequities, and more.)

One trans woman of color was trying to come to grips with an estimated lifespan figure more than ten years shorter than the one that has been published most often. (We are not repeating any of the (incorrect) estimated lifetime figures that are circulating, to avoid even inadvertent reinforcement.) Faced with the report of yet another attack on another trans woman, she wrote:

These days, I look at the latest reports of stabbed, shot, beaten trans women, search myself for tears, and I cannot find a thing. I want to mourn and rage. I want to honor all of our sisters — the hundreds each year who are ripped, namelessly and without fanfare, from this life — who are taken so young before their time. But the grief and anger — even empathy — do not come. I don’t feel anything but numbness and fatigue, and somewhere far below that, fear.

The terrible irony of the life expectancy “fact” is that it is based on an impossibility. The only ways to determine a given population’s life expectancy are to: examine decades or more of death certificates or census data containing the information being studied, or follow a specific set of individuals for around 100 years and record every single death. There is not and never has been a census of transgender people. Our death certificates do not mark us as transgender. There has been no 100-year-long study of a representative group of trans people. So where are the estimatedlifespan figures coming from?

FORGE tracked the most commonly-cited figure back to what was most likely the 2014 Philadelphia Transgender Health Conference, where a workshop presenter gave the figure and explained she had calculated it by averaging the age of death for all of those listed on the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) website. This means the figure is actually the average age of those trans people who were both murdered and came to the attention of someone who added them to the TDOR list. Interestingly, this average is very close to the average age of everyone who is murdered in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics. [I’m not seeing an average age given in the cited source but you can see on page 5 of this Bureau of Justice Statistics report (pdf) that the average age of homicide victims in the U.S. was between 30 and 35 from 1980 to 2008.]

But not everyone is murdered.

Despite how many there may appear to be, only a tiny, tiny fraction of transpeople are killed by otherpeople. Most of us, transwomen of color included, live average lifespans and die of the most common U.S. killers — heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and unintentional injuries (accidents).

Please don’t add to fear and hopelessness by spreading inaccurate and profoundly disempowering data.

Since I can’t respond to everyone directly, I’m @ing some people who’ve brought this up on my post and may be interested: (urls removed after posting for their privacy). I appreciate your thoughtfulness in bringing this to my attention. If you or anyone else has a source on any of these figures that can provide specific methodology, I’d be very grateful to see that.

In closing, here are some resources that provide a more hopeful view of trans aging. They are well known but I hope they will be helpful to someone.

To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Older Adults

#RealLiveTransAdult and RealLifeTransAdult.com

Trans Elders’ Life Histories, an upcoming oral history project which will hopefully be available soon in the University of Victoria Transgender Archives

SAGE: Advocacy and Services for LGBT Elders, where you can potentially volunteer with trans and other LGBT seniors

GRIOT Circle, a Brooklyn organization supporting LGBTQ elders of color

NEW: The NYC Trans Oral History Project, which includes interviews with several older trans adults (and needs volunteer transcribers!)

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“Don’t use your mental illness as an excuse” means “Change your behavior, apologize, and do better next time.” 

“Don’t use your mental illness as an excuse” DOES NOT mean “Your symptoms are your fault, your disorder is not even an explanation, and you are a bad person if you behave less than neurotypical”

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Presented by myself and @goodluckdetective without comment