Fucking wild to be teaching about Rosa Parks at the same time as a trans woman in Florida does an act of civil disobedience to use a women’s restroom in the state capitol
As far as I know, she is the first woman arrested bc of this law. The law requires that the trans person be warned to leave the bathroom by a state official, and then if they stay they are guilty of trespassing after a warning.
So like, me, my gf, others just piss and nobody asks or tells, but this young woman sent a statement about the law to over 100 FL lawmakers so they would know she was coming, the cops were ready for her, she brought a reporter and went in anyway and spent the night in a men’s jail. She is out on bail, and is hoping this will inspire change of the law. But if found guilty, and the law is upheld as constitutional, then she could spend up to 60 days in a mens county jail.
We wake up afraid from bombing and unfortunately the war return again. 💔💔💔
I’m so afraid about my family and my kids please help us evacuate from this place we are crying now and screaming because of the strength of bombing around us.
please help us everything is very dangerous and we return to the killing people. you can support us and my family by donating or sharing my compaign.
i think the hill i’m going to die on here is that lasting anti-fascist activism begins and ends with unrestricted social services.
protests are great. kind of indispensable right now. but in times when we can be less reactive, you want to know what you’re protesting *for*, not just against.
today i saw a post elseweb saying “why aren’t white women fleeing maga? they have to know by now that tradwife means sex slave”. and like… it’s very simple. they can’t leave because they would end up like me.
they’re, we’re, deliberately made unemployable so that we’ll have to marry whatever mediocre white man picks us out. as it happened, i was unappealingly intersex, fat, butch, and autistic, so none of the mediocre white boys of my generation ever took a second look at me, but that didn’t give me job skills or career connections.
i knew multiple women whose husbands divorced them and took the house as part of their midlife crises. they had to send the kids to live with relatives and take dead-end jobs like bagging groceries because they were in their forties with zero job experience. if they’d rejected the worldview, if they’d alienated their families and what few friends didn’t victim-blame them for the divorces, they’d have had nowhere to turn.
it’s been over twelve years since i got out. psychologically, medically, i’m healthier. but i’ve chased a fresh start through half a dozen states. i spent my inheritance getting a degree. none of it helped. there are no supports for abandoning (or being abandoned by) your support network.
you won’t defeat fascism until my people are free to leave the cult if they realize they want out. until we can access free housing to get away from financial abuse, free comprehensive job training and placement services to help us start careers, national healthcare so we can flee across state lines if necessary without losing any medical care we’re lucky enough to have access to, protections for children and teens so they can flee without needing a parent’s help… universal basic income would be really good but there are smaller steps that could help with financial independence.
and it all has to be available to everybody, including people you think are “unworthy”. people who hold the wrong opinions. drug addicts. people whose husbands or parents make too much money. people who aren’t from around here. unrepentant bigots. if they want out, you have to give them a path out. minds can change later, once people are less scared and less pressured.
(i’m ex-catholic. do you want to hear about what happens when you force people to profess certain beliefs in order to access basic assistance? i have two thousand years of examples.)
“but if they really wanted out they’d do the Right Thing and leave without support!” Better to be one man’s sex slave than turning tricks on the street. “staying just proves they’re actually evil and there for the bigotry!” Live in your car for six months in 100°F heat, twice, and then talk to me again. There’s no virtue in cutting yourself off from society just to prove some kind of moral point. All that does is get you dead or worse.
(“JT, you’re not dead” I’m a fucking cockroach. Most people would be dead by now. Survival bias goes both ways; we’re not all the same model of airplane.)
I would like to talk about the white woman tradwife thing bc I feel like I have a pretty close perspective on it
I grew up Mormon. In the Mormon church it is ingrained into you that a woman’s place is in the home and having Mormon babies with their Mormon husband and they do not try to beat around the bush about it. There’s a whole article called Family: A Proclamation to The World published by the church and viewed as scripture by the members of the church that goes over all the details. (I’m sure you can find it on their website, I will not be linking it).
Growing up, I watched how these teachings affected my mother. I watched a woman with undiagnosed Bipolar 2 attempt to manage a household and raise 4 children while my father was away at work all day. When he came home, he’d change the TV to whatever he wanted to watch, sit down, eat dinner, eventually fall asleep in his chair because he was “tired from work”. He couldn’t possibly do any household tasks or care for his children. I don’t think I ever saw that man wash the dishes in the full 19 years I lived at home. At around middle school/high school, I realized how this was not fair to my mom or to us children (the Mormon church views them as extensions of the parents). We were also laborers of the home because my mom was and that’s who we were home with.
I started speaking up. I was very vocal about how I thought this was not a fair trade off for my mom and I think this is also about the time my dad stopped liking me so much, pretty sure it’s related.
By the time I moved out my mother was incredibly burnt out and is to this day - she still does not understand why (or says she doesn’t understand why she’s so tired and lacking motivation).
Fast forward to 2019
I married my high school sweetheart. Our relationship had always been rocky but I married him anyway, because I loved him.
I knew I had always wanted children and so did my husband so we decided to add to our family (on top of other deciding factors ofc). Then in 2022 I got pregnant and had my kid and watched my husband turn into my dad, his dad, every white southern cis dad before him. And I had become my mom - alone in the house with no one but a baby to talk to until he came home from work.
Remember when I said I wanted this? I did. I wanted a family and a husband but what I didn’t realize was that I actually did not want to sacrifice everything about who I am as a person to become an in-home slave. The church I grew up in and left at 17 had promised me that I’d still feel fulfilled. Tradwives across the internet promised me I’d still feel fulfilled. And here’s where I should’ve seen the problem because the people who were telling me I’d feel fulfilled the loudest? The men in the Mormon church.
So why didn’t I see this coming? I could say it’s not what my husband was before we had our kid but that wouldnt be true. During my time alone, I had a lot of time to reflect and realized, my husband had never shown initiative for any household management tasks in our relationship. He’d say things like “ugh the kitchen is disgusting” and not wash the dishes. Or “oh my god the laundry has gotten insane” and not start a load. I didn’t see this coming because despite me leaving the church as a teenager, I had been going since birth. This is messaging that I heard on a weekly basis for 17 years of my life. I could smoke and drink and get as many tattoos and piercings as I wanted but that doesn’t force the religious indoctrination to be exercised from by mind, unfortunately. And I didn’t catch it soon enough.
Now, we are separated and soon to be divorced. I’m still alone in the house with my baby but at least I don’t have a man coming home, turning on the tv to one of his shows, and sitting on the couch for the rest of the night because he’s “tired from work”.
All of that being said, I was then in a position of trying to find a job with a 2 year gap in my resume, only able to work part time, and while it is illegal to not hire someone because of their parental status Texas does it anyway.
I also had zero dollars to my name and still had to rely on my ex financially.
This is why the MAGA women don’t leave. Y’all are forgetting the religious indoctrination of the husband being the head of the household. What he says, goes. And if you go against it after YEARS of being married (decades in some cases) and he decides to leave, you have quite literally nothing. No employment experience, no money, and no sense of self. They are scared and rightfully so.
Hello! Exvangelical and also a MAGA-cult survivor here, and I did leave! I left in 2019, voted with my gut in 2020, and fully left my faith in 2021. I am exactly the poster child for all the people who want folks to “just do the right thing and leave without support!” and let me just tell you:
Leaving was the best decision I’ve ever made for my conscience.
Leaving was also. The worst decision I’ve ever made in every other metric, that has completely and utterly destroyed my life in irreparable ways. If growing up in a cult shortened my life by five years, the stressful and painful process of extricating myself from that cult shortened my life by at least another ten.
I left in 2021, when I was about 20 years old. I’m going to be 24 this year and I’m still feeling the effects of my decision. I’ve had homelessness hanging over me for the past 4 years, I’ve got almost no social group anymore, no community, no support. I’ve encountered communist and leftist groups that talk big about all the things we need in this country, but when the rubber hits the road, the amount of support they can actually offer me in their community trends towards… not all that much, really.
Now, I’m vocally fairly left-leaning right now, which I’ve been steadily moving more left since I extricated myself from MAGA, but I did not start out so aggreable to left-leaning ideology, and folks would have hated and rejected me 6 years ago when I first actually properly left MAGA, and I wouldn’t have gotten any material support from them at all—not that I’m really getting any material support right now, but it’s the idea. The people who are freshly out aren’t going to be particularly pretty or politically correct, they won’t share your views and they will grow but they need time, and they’re not gonna get forgiven by everyone and that’s just life. We have to live with that, and we can’t just ask people who maybe ARE willing to leave a cult, to fucking kill themselves [never stated directly, but if someone is going to die if they leave because they have absolutely no support system, and people are saying they should leave anyway and if they die then it’s just collateral, that’s pretty fucking callous if you ask me??] because they got indoctrinated into a cult at some point and therefore their lives are forfeit.
If you’re doing that, if you’re writing people off as disposable in the name of your cause, not gonna lie, you’re doing exactly the same as the MAGA cultists do. If you’re dehumanising a different group—still declaring people’s lives forfeit in the name of your great grand vision of the world, then that makes you a scary, dangerous motherfucker and I do not trust you and I do not think you should be trusted. No one is immune to propaganda, it can genuinely happen to anyone, and especially people can be born to fuckers who are in a cult. That happened to me. And we’ve had this conversation before: no one should be written off and their lives declared forfeit just because they were born to the wrong people.Like that’s also kind of the whole schtick of not being racist or ableist, if I remember correctly?
I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, but…. most people aren’t me, and I have to live with that knowledge, and so do all of y'all. I’m a absolute cockroach of an individual and most people in my shoes would be dead. They would have killed themselves. I know they would have, because I nearly succeeded at that when I tried. Frankly, leaving very nearly killed me and ngl, it still very much might within the next 5 years, and I’m now indistinguishable from “one of you” leftists, and I’m not getting cared for in a lot of meaningful ways either.
Robust social services exist for people who are gradually or suddenly alienated from everyone they’ve ever known.
Yes, even the little old childless ladies. Yes, even for the crotchety asshole little old childless ladies who have alienated their entire extended family [ESPECIALLY FOR THE NASTY LITTLE OLD LADIES ACTUALLY!!! It’s actually super important for the cause of reproductive rights for people to have the option to be childless and it to not be a death sentence; I could spill a lot of ink about this but I don’t need to say more, because you’re very smart and you’ve already figured this one out, right??…… Excellent, moving on.] Yes, even the people who don’t exactly think like you. Yes, even the people who still stan Harry Potter or fuckin… whatever. I don’t care. Even the transphobes and the homophobes, and the whatever-else. When the rubber hits the road they need to have the option to extricate themselves from their ideology freely.
Robust social services represents freedom to leave shitty abusive situations. Truly just “if it sucks, hit da bricks!” Leave a shitty abusive job, leave some shitty abusive parents, leave a shitty abusive ex, leave a shitty abusive ideological group. With social services that mean you won’t die if you leave? It will still be inordinately painful to leave everyone you’ve ever known, and we still can’t demand that of anyone, but those shitty abusive situations aren’t holding literal life and death over their victims anymore.
These things allow people a chance to heal from indoctrination of various kinds, and not fucking die during the process of healing while they’re vulnerable and lacking support systems and skills and they’re not necessarily going to be pleasant people to be around just yet because they haven’t healed, which takes time. It’s so important to have these systems, so that the people who leave—leftists like me, the poster child of “doing the right thing and leaving without support"—can have a future at all.
I left MAGA. I left my faith. I did it. I won. And it was the best and worst decision I’ve ever made in my life. I got my sense of self back, I wasn’t flattened into the image of a cult adherent anymore… but I lost…. everything else. All of my personal possessions, all of my friends, all of my family, all of my documents, all of my medical records… everything. I lost everything and building back has been painful and miserable and lonely as all goddamn hell, and I genuinely and truly would never ever wish this sort of pain onto anyone else in the world, not even my worst enemies.
And truly. If you want to inflict this sort of pain onto other people for you to feel morally superior, and you don’t care if they get hurt or suffer or die, just because they were unlucky, just because they were born to the wrong people? From the bottom of my cold dead little leftist heart: Fuck you.
