Politics At Home
Jun. 12th, 2026 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeRogan: normally we do not do this (we usually want our public blog to be fun or interesting), but considering the American political situation right now and how much it relies on complacency, cultural amnesia, and refusing to think about unpleasantries, we’ve decided to share how that political situation has directly affected us.
We are doing this in hopes of bringing the consequences closer to home, even if those consequences are minor compared to school children being bombed in Iran. (Remember how Trump claimed no more pointless wars?) We live in a liberal area, but only a fool assumes that equals protection. So, in rough chronological order:
- 2019: we get put on an antifa watchlist for coming to a pro-Trump straight pride counterprotest wielding signs covered in penises.
- summer, 2022: we get our passport renewed for a Toronto comic con. For Canada, you only need the cheaper passport card, not the book... but we have a sense of foreboding and pay extra for the book, “just in case.”
- January 2023: we get a hysterectomy specifically in response to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, which happens due to a court packed with Trump nominations.
- July 2023: we encounter our first in-person transphobe accusing us of wanting to rape kids on a local bus. (He is also spewing racist slurs at the driver and refusing to pay his fare, leading to the bus stopping and many leaving.) We bounce him and it won’t be until much later that I naïvely realize this is becoming part of the political narrative scapegoating us.
- October 2024: Trumpers protest my local library’s drag queen story hour, phone in a phony bomb threat to forcibly clear the joint, and are finally ushered out by the police after taking a swing at a counterprotester who kept dancing around them in combat boots and rainbows. We spontaneously join the counterprotest.
- November 2024: Trump becomes president again. We post a friend’s prep list, and many folks, including us, speedrun it. At least two other people we know get sterilized because of this. A friend overseas offers help if we need to flee the country. We make I.W.M.C. to detox.
- January, 2025: Trump passes an executive order banning the gender marker X on driver’s licenses. We scramble to renew ours early, racing to get that X while it is still obtainable.
- Also in January: Elon Musk starts cutting people from food stamps, disability, and Social Security en masse. Through nothing but luck, we make it through, but we start protesting the local Tesla dealership and end up on the news. (As Mori put it, someone as obscenely wealthy as Musk cannot be harmed in any meaningful way materially, so you have to go for his ego.)
- March 2025: we hit a town hall meeting, running a gantlet of the same Trumpers who fake-bombed the library, and dealing with transphobia in the meeting itself, plus massive tech problems. We make Genderful to detox.
- May 2025: We lose our entire mental health care team because Trump illegally withheld money already allocated to funding the community care center, requiring hasty mass layoffs. We will spend a few months chasing down a new therapist; our meds are handed off to our primary care doctor, not ideal. Said doctor’s office starts scrubbing trans patient records. Said fund-strangling also makes us focus on stockpiling at-risk speculative fiction at the library we volunteer at.
- July 2025: the Big Buttfucking Bill passes and we get an obsequious lying email from the government about it. We tighten up our homelessness plan and prep for our food stamps, disability, and health insurance to get whittled down. We also eat Trump in effigy.
- also July 2025: AllFam gets banned from itch.io in a big purge of queer, porn, and taboo artists formerly welcomed. This is part of the general bleaching of art under the Trump administration, even as Trump himself tries to overturn his convictions for sexual assault and stop the Epstein files from leaking his name (remember when he was all about releasing those files?) Perhaps in overcompensating backlash, more and more sales sites explicitly prohibit works like AllFam as child pornography... thereby painting victims telling their stories as RETROACTIVE CHILD MOLESTERS OF THEMSELVES and thus playing into Trump’s and Epstein’s hands and muzzling their victims. We throw a banned book sale, plan for further bans, and start giving speeches at cons as to why you should pay us in cash.
- August 2025: we get more obsequious email from the government lying about how much Trump is helping us. We MST it.
- September 2025: we have to make an insanejournal to mirror this Dreamwidth due to the site being banned by government legislation in Mississippi, part of a greater Trump-Republican push for greater online surveillance of the populace and moral purity. We start making essay zines like Headspace Essays and Crisis Planning to compensate.
- November 2025: Trump illegally cuts everyone’s food stamps for the month, starving the hungry (on Thanksgiving!) to force compliance. We help clean out kitchens to fill community fridges and give money to our friends in trouble so they can eat.
- March 2026: Meagan Morris gets arrested and convicted on trumped up charged for protesting ICE in Texas. She is kept in a men’s jail and faces 10-60 years.
- June 2026: the IRS (gutted of funding and personnel by Trump, who is trying to avoid the consequences of his obvious tax evasion) sends us a notice claiming we owe over $600 in taxes on top of the $700 we already paid. We discover they seem to have duplicated a line item, thereby doubling our income in a boneheaded error that never should have crossed our desk. The problem can only be solved via phone. Day one: we call, get put on hold two hours, then get a robo “we cannot complete your call at this time,” and get hung up on. Day two: no hold, straight to “cannot complete your call at this time, goodbye.” We will have to call the tax man every day until we reach a human to fix this. (EDIT: called back, spent three and a half hours on hold, but indeed, once I reached the correct person, it was sorted out very quickly: a line error on their part. The woman sounded incredibly tired and stressed out. I tried my damnedest to be nice to her, since it’s not HER fault her department is overworked, understaffed, and being politically attacked.)
Oh, and two people we know have fled the country, one for Portugal, another for Israel.
What we’re saying is, we aren’t even near the top of the shit list and we have already lost business, food stamps, money, health care, and had to make permanent modifications to this body because of Trump and his bootlickers. It’s bad out there, guys, and it’s so much worse for so many other people. And because we’re legally disabled and don’t have much money, we cannot legally leave the country, and we are spectacularly unqualified for immigrating and living undocumented. We are okay, we are fighting... but it’s bad, and a lot of people are burying their heads in the sand. Please don’t, guys. Don’t freeze in apathy and complacence because it’s easier. KEEP FIGHTING WITH US.
We are doing this in hopes of bringing the consequences closer to home, even if those consequences are minor compared to school children being bombed in Iran. (Remember how Trump claimed no more pointless wars?) We live in a liberal area, but only a fool assumes that equals protection. So, in rough chronological order:
- 2019: we get put on an antifa watchlist for coming to a pro-Trump straight pride counterprotest wielding signs covered in penises.
- summer, 2022: we get our passport renewed for a Toronto comic con. For Canada, you only need the cheaper passport card, not the book... but we have a sense of foreboding and pay extra for the book, “just in case.”
- January 2023: we get a hysterectomy specifically in response to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, which happens due to a court packed with Trump nominations.
- July 2023: we encounter our first in-person transphobe accusing us of wanting to rape kids on a local bus. (He is also spewing racist slurs at the driver and refusing to pay his fare, leading to the bus stopping and many leaving.) We bounce him and it won’t be until much later that I naïvely realize this is becoming part of the political narrative scapegoating us.
- October 2024: Trumpers protest my local library’s drag queen story hour, phone in a phony bomb threat to forcibly clear the joint, and are finally ushered out by the police after taking a swing at a counterprotester who kept dancing around them in combat boots and rainbows. We spontaneously join the counterprotest.
- November 2024: Trump becomes president again. We post a friend’s prep list, and many folks, including us, speedrun it. At least two other people we know get sterilized because of this. A friend overseas offers help if we need to flee the country. We make I.W.M.C. to detox.
- January, 2025: Trump passes an executive order banning the gender marker X on driver’s licenses. We scramble to renew ours early, racing to get that X while it is still obtainable.
- Also in January: Elon Musk starts cutting people from food stamps, disability, and Social Security en masse. Through nothing but luck, we make it through, but we start protesting the local Tesla dealership and end up on the news. (As Mori put it, someone as obscenely wealthy as Musk cannot be harmed in any meaningful way materially, so you have to go for his ego.)
- March 2025: we hit a town hall meeting, running a gantlet of the same Trumpers who fake-bombed the library, and dealing with transphobia in the meeting itself, plus massive tech problems. We make Genderful to detox.
- May 2025: We lose our entire mental health care team because Trump illegally withheld money already allocated to funding the community care center, requiring hasty mass layoffs. We will spend a few months chasing down a new therapist; our meds are handed off to our primary care doctor, not ideal. Said doctor’s office starts scrubbing trans patient records. Said fund-strangling also makes us focus on stockpiling at-risk speculative fiction at the library we volunteer at.
- July 2025: the Big Buttfucking Bill passes and we get an obsequious lying email from the government about it. We tighten up our homelessness plan and prep for our food stamps, disability, and health insurance to get whittled down. We also eat Trump in effigy.
- also July 2025: AllFam gets banned from itch.io in a big purge of queer, porn, and taboo artists formerly welcomed. This is part of the general bleaching of art under the Trump administration, even as Trump himself tries to overturn his convictions for sexual assault and stop the Epstein files from leaking his name (remember when he was all about releasing those files?) Perhaps in overcompensating backlash, more and more sales sites explicitly prohibit works like AllFam as child pornography... thereby painting victims telling their stories as RETROACTIVE CHILD MOLESTERS OF THEMSELVES and thus playing into Trump’s and Epstein’s hands and muzzling their victims. We throw a banned book sale, plan for further bans, and start giving speeches at cons as to why you should pay us in cash.
- August 2025: we get more obsequious email from the government lying about how much Trump is helping us. We MST it.
- September 2025: we have to make an insanejournal to mirror this Dreamwidth due to the site being banned by government legislation in Mississippi, part of a greater Trump-Republican push for greater online surveillance of the populace and moral purity. We start making essay zines like Headspace Essays and Crisis Planning to compensate.
- November 2025: Trump illegally cuts everyone’s food stamps for the month, starving the hungry (on Thanksgiving!) to force compliance. We help clean out kitchens to fill community fridges and give money to our friends in trouble so they can eat.
- March 2026: Meagan Morris gets arrested and convicted on trumped up charged for protesting ICE in Texas. She is kept in a men’s jail and faces 10-60 years.
- June 2026: the IRS (gutted of funding and personnel by Trump, who is trying to avoid the consequences of his obvious tax evasion) sends us a notice claiming we owe over $600 in taxes on top of the $700 we already paid. We discover they seem to have duplicated a line item, thereby doubling our income in a boneheaded error that never should have crossed our desk. The problem can only be solved via phone. Day one: we call, get put on hold two hours, then get a robo “we cannot complete your call at this time,” and get hung up on. Day two: no hold, straight to “cannot complete your call at this time, goodbye.” We will have to call the tax man every day until we reach a human to fix this. (EDIT: called back, spent three and a half hours on hold, but indeed, once I reached the correct person, it was sorted out very quickly: a line error on their part. The woman sounded incredibly tired and stressed out. I tried my damnedest to be nice to her, since it’s not HER fault her department is overworked, understaffed, and being politically attacked.)
Oh, and two people we know have fled the country, one for Portugal, another for Israel.
What we’re saying is, we aren’t even near the top of the shit list and we have already lost business, food stamps, money, health care, and had to make permanent modifications to this body because of Trump and his bootlickers. It’s bad out there, guys, and it’s so much worse for so many other people. And because we’re legally disabled and don’t have much money, we cannot legally leave the country, and we are spectacularly unqualified for immigrating and living undocumented. We are okay, we are fighting... but it’s bad, and a lot of people are burying their heads in the sand. Please don’t, guys. Don’t freeze in apathy and complacence because it’s easier. KEEP FIGHTING WITH US.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-12 06:02 pm (UTC)At this point, we're all just praying for It to Happen, so we can Crab Rave.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-12 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-06-12 10:13 pm (UTC)Almost unrelated to your post, but I'm glad this got sorted, even if it took way more time than it should have (and should not have happened in the first place).
Seeing the whole list of how you've fought to stay afloat and push back against the insanity in this world is gut-wrenching. I really hope that you'll be okay.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-12 11:49 pm (UTC)And well, at least our morale is good and we have a lot of experience in surviving! But yeah, having it all listed in bullets makes it painfully obvious how we’ve already adapted to a level of harassment that we forget how bad it is.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-13 01:18 am (UTC)