in your hospital bed,

the spice of Big Red gum

sharp on my tongue.

The wrapper, in your palm,

crumpled as you drift back to sleep.

Then there was the emptiness

of your chair, the arms a lighter blue

where your wrists rested

at the height of your sickness.

I began counting, wishing obsessively

to pull a magic card to transport me back

to the bed where I jumped and fell upon,

my body gathered in your arms afterward

like warm clothes. You carried me

to the deck, the sun burned

into the pink sky across the bay.

The next morning,

we pull bottles from the water, treasure

from a lost factory that exploded,

its assembly line to rest among the sandsharks.

Years later, I find you

in other people, or how I imagined you to be.

We’ll sit by the water and I’ll drink

until I think it’s you, laugh with them,

intoxicated and full of love.

And then I lose you again,

in the grocery store, around a corner.

My thoughts go blank.

Our house burned when I was young

You carried me down the fire escape,

my legs hooked around the curve in your arms,

a latch I can’t break.

I count this as your penance for your own deep guilt.

There is no judge but you and my memory

that holds your past. I think of your hands, strong

and wrinkled. Your sweater in my closet

that I wear when I am sad. Small tributes,

Like flowers around your casket, your hands

yellow and folded in prayer.

My eyes, wide, expanded beside you as I watch

your chest, waiting for breath.

I did not leave you there

but moved you into my apartment.

You helped carry my mattress

but the weight was my own.

I look for you now in objects,

the blue curtains, dimmed

like the fabric on your chair,

the paintings you left for me

to hang on my walls,

Indian takeout,

like your caretaker’s home cooking

the mirror, your lips, and chin,

your rounded cheeks, and eyes

in the glass, still wide,

shocked, like suburban pools.

The May rain is cold like the autumn storm

you lost yourself in, your kayak drifting

among the waves as you grasped for a buoy.

The coast guard rescued you from the water,

but sometimes I imagine myself there with you

To feel the fear

To empathize with the risk

To move within the water

A reverse birth, gasping

as the flood lights fall down from

a helicopter, and a hand reaches for me.

[A poem I wrote in 2020]

That Book Is Banned? I Want to Read It! (Resources on Banned Books)

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Culture in the Third Reich: Overview

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Stanford lecturer explores the rise of book bans, from Nazi book burnings to school board races

All 850 Books Texas Lawmaker Matt Krause Wants to Ban: An Analysis

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Counts v. Cedarville School District, a 2003 U.S. federal district court decision

1978 decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Right to Read Defense Committee of Chelsea v. School Committee of the City of Chelsea

The Comstock Law at 150: A highly relevant cautionary tale for today

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Local no longer: 4 new laws and policies bring book banning to the state level

The State of Book Bans: South Carolina Is Poised to Get Worse

Penguin Random House, Authors Sue Iowa Officials Over School Book Ban

Book Publishers Sue Florida, Alleging School Library Law Violates First Amendment

Albuquerque Public Schools Board Meeting Calendar

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The Obscenity of Banning Books

The Discriminatory Impact Of Book Bans And Educational Gag Orders On LGBTQ+ Expression

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(A short story I wrote in 2019)

Trigger Warning: mention of suicide / depression

I was home again. I had been away for a while. I walked over the orange, damp leaves that had been pressed into the ground by rain, a liquid encasement around them as if they had been curated in a black frame. The streets were wet and I had walked to a place I had frequented many times, along the edges of the thin suburban sidewalks and under the beaming spot lights from the varying street lamps. I had been away for a few months and, in that time, the trees had grown heavy. Although still wooded, the surrounding pathways that aided my route weren’t warming with the bright greenness of summer. There were patches among the branches where light would have flooded through had it been earlier in the day. It was dark and it was cold.

I pulled my coat over the front of my face, blowing hot air through my mouth so that it warmed my cheeks. The liquid streaming from my eyes from the harsh wind was common during the Long Island Fall. I walked through a grid of streets that filled with lights from through the bay windows of rigid and identical houses. The path that I walked was familiar. I had been here before, but there was less light than I remembered. My time spent under the city’s extreme and constant brightness of storefronts had made me sensitive to the visible and opaque darkness.

As I turned the corner onto a street that I had frequented many times before — drinking tall cans of beer between parked cars, kissing and biting, gently, on wanting lips, I began to feel tired. I was worn from hardly sleeping and my eyes were bare from crying. It had been weeks since the first time I had crawled into my twin-sized bed in my tiny dorm room on the east side of Manhattan and screamed into my pillow. I wanted to see how far my voice could reach without anyone hearing. The screams were so common that they felt familiar to me. I knew that my hollowed eyes shot out emptiness into the world as I pedantically insulted characters from an Edith Wharton novel in my midday bi-weekly modernist literature class. I had been sick this October, physically and mentally, a bronchial cough nursing my depression as a form of distraction. They were both there and they sat on me, heavy and full of blame.

The house I knew moved toward me. I could not force myself to walk away. The arches of two oak trees, almost bare of leaves, hugged its edges, the wood of the trunks acting as a frame. As I continued to walk toward the house, I thought of the basement that sat below it, tucked into the damp ground. It would be full of people disguised by layers of fading smoke from the passing of joints — a tomb where many of us had been cocooned with half-finished conversations.

I heard familiar tones and voices, teasing and cursing, a loud gesture of flirtation guised as genuine conversation. I approached the concrete stairwell that led down to the entrance of the basement, where the party swelled.

There was a figure facing away from me, her back arched as her hands draped down to wrap widely around her knees. Her purple hair stuck out from the hood of her winter coat.

Facing my direction was Art. His eyes were sunken into his head, deeper than I remembered. The softness around them had been there before, in the summer before our contact grew cold. He had let the stubble around his upper lip and down to his chin grow out a bit longer since we last spoken. I remember him sitting under a wide oak tree, brushing our arms together as we drank Tallboys in a hammock. As I turned to walk down the stairway, he scoffed at something the woman, Denir, had said. His eyes shifted to me, his lips loosening and parting. This was a surprise. I hadn’t told anyone I was coming home.

“Art, Denir,” I forced my voice to a higher pitch to mask the monotone I had recently adopted.

“Hi, Coll,” Art nodded.

Denir turned around, her mouth dropping down excitedly. “Coll!”

We stood in that space on the stairwell for a few minutes. I moved down the stairs to stand beside Art, my body not pressing against his, but still standing close enough to feel his warmth as the dampness of the night sucked itself into the concrete structure around us.

The party within the metal door was loud, the strumming of an acoustic guitar intermittently dominant among the familiar voices. As we entered the basement, a rush of smoke, exiting from someone’s mouth, hit us and we moved through it into the gathering. There were hands reaching for me from the couch to acknowledge that I had entered the room, old acquaintances giving slight nods. Max, the man who was hosting the party stumbled toward us, tripping and then steadying himself with his back against the wall. He reached both of his hands out to grab mine. I stepped away. His knees bended beneath him as he crossed both arms and looked down at his feet. I found my way to the mini-kitchen that took up half of the basement, passing by a table set up with solo cups. That extreme boredom, that awful game.

I opened a cabinet and removed a glass from it. I filled it with water from the spout of the adjacent sink as Max leaned on the wall beside me and watched. He placed his hand under his chin and gazed up at me with a dreamy smirk. I ignored him and took a plastic bag from my backpack. It was a small, rectangular shape, with pink powder creating its girth.

“What is that, Coll?” Max’s smile had deepened.

“THC Kool-Aid.” I smiled back at him, giving him a tiny hook to bite onto so that he would not make me leave. I opened the clear bag and dumped the pink powder into the glass of water. It swirled, closing the spaces of clear liquid and forming an opaque fluid. I gulped down the Kool-Aid, hoping for a decent high.

Dave reached his hands out and attempted to wrap his arms around my legs from his bended position. I quickly moved out of the way and scanned the room. Where is Art?

Art was leaning against the wall outside, listening to someone drone on about weed and music, where I had initially found him. When I approached him, his eyes shifted to me, looking softer.

“How have you been?” I genuinely wanted to know.

“Been doing the same shit,” He said. “Looking for work again.”

“Oh, yeah? I’ve been so busy.” I looked down at my feet, shuffling them slightly.

“Yeah, I’ve been wondering where you’ve been.” He said this directly, his hollowed eyes looking into mine.

“At school. You know. Lots of stuff.” I met his gaze. “I’ve been having a hard time.” I should tell him about the depression.

“I haven’t been able to sleep,” he said suddenly.

“Why?” I asked the question I had expected him to direct to me. I did want him to acknowledge my pain, but I managed to be polite, hoping that he would return the favor.

“Thinking about too many things.” He bowed his head.

“What things?” My politeness shifted to a curiosity I could use as a distraction.

“Nothing.” He shuffled his feet. “It’s in the past.”

“What is?” I felt a tightness in my chest. It began to crawl beneath my skin and into my throat. I felt breathless and unable to express comfort.

Art settled back against the damp concrete, the wall engulfing his frame as a tomb would cling to a corpse. He exhaled, the misty air swirling around us with dusty particles of broken autumn leaves.

“I’ve been going over this in my head. It could have changed things for me. Or rather, it did change things, but for the worse. If it hadn’t happened . . . ” He trailed off as he exhaled the smoke from a cigarette.

I stared at him, the embers deep in his eyes igniting briefly as the prospect of change was considered. Once again, I could only exhale a question.

“How would they be different?”

He leaned forward, pushing his head to hover parallel with the ground and wrapped his arms around himself, his palms cupping his elbows as if he were resisting the urge to collapse.

“Have you ever felt so attacked that the only thing you could do was inflict pain on the person who hurt you?” He pulled a final cigarette from a crumpled pack in his pocket.

“I’m not sure if that’s the best way.” I was direct in my disagreement.

“It’s not the best way. It’s just what happens sometimes.” His eyes flickered, a moment of darkness overtaking them.

I thought of the people who had hurt me and the hurt I returned.

“I have.” I was quiet in my agreement. I looked at him blankly, signalling him to continue.

“I dislike that I caused someone pain, but I did not deserve to lose everything.” The smoke he exhaled got caught in the wind and blew back at me.

I began to feel unsteady and used my hand to balance myself against the wall. “What is this about?” I was confused and not following the conversation well. Why was I here again, in a place where there was only sadness masked with noise and escape?

“It’s about me ruining my entire life because I couldn’t let something go. I couldn’t stop after someone stole from me. I needed to get them back and it made me feel worse and fucked up my living situation. I’m back with my parents and I can hardly get any work. I’m exhausted.” The words he had been holding in himself with vague commentary slipped into the public space.

“You’re saying what you did was wrong, but you’re aware of it. You acknowledge it. Is that enough?” That was my generic response.

He turned to me, his irises disappearing into the blackness surrounding them. I felt high, the drugs I had swallowed dragging me closer to the ground.

Art sat down beside Denir. I stood facing them, pulling a cigarette from the pack in my coat.

“You’ll be okay, Art,” Denir was saying.

“I just don’t know how exactly I will get through it,” He said.

I did not understand why I was here, with these people, when I should be at home, finishing a paper that was due in a few days. As Art trailed off, I stared at the space behind his head.

Our summer had been spent drinking beside the flowers that protruded into the dirt paths of our local state park. I rode my bike to the bar to meet him, my legs working under the cover of stars that blanketed our wooded streets beside the ocean. We were tucked away in the alcoves of the overhangs at the beach, our sour breaths foul-smelling in the summer heat. We hadn’t spoken in months and it hurt me to see him this way, mostly because it is the way I felt. I could not empathize with him because there was no room for my empathy. I could only feel my own pain which was so reflective of the pain he felt. I did not want to let myself off the hook for relieving myself of the pain I had caused. I judged him as I would have judged myself, because I saw myself when he spoke. These words were his reality, and mine.

It was no longer summer and the cold October air was conditioning us to tuck ourselves away until the world was ready to hold us up again.

“Usually I would be there for you and you know that. But, I’m hardly holding it together,” I said to him. I felt uncomfortable. “I need to take care of myself.”

Art looked at me. I couldn’t tell if he felt betrayed or if I was projecting him to think that. The world had betrayed me but I felt that my own betrayal was unrecognizable.

“I’ll walk you home.” I offered.

The air was denser now that the night was colder. We didn’t speak much on the walk home. I told him about how I was tired of coming back to this place and always finding it the same, but feeling different about it every time. We took a trail near the train tracks, walking beside them before stepping into the darkness of the woods. The path was layered with a blanket of leaves, soaking and damp from a natural wash cycle. We walked beside each other, and I was leading as he fell behind. We were farther from the ocean now, but I could still smell salt. When the pain lessened, we could use it for our wounds.

We exited the trail among the trees onto a street with tiny, bright colored houses, still visible from the miniature lamps hanging gently above their stone stoops. His house came first. I left him at the edge of the driveway. Before he began to walk up to his house, he hesitated and turned to me. I looked at him, blankly. He nodded and said, “Goodnight, Coll.”

He walked up his front walk, the rising and falling of his back swallowed by the portrait of the brown structure of his home, the night sky dotted with stars that had broken through the clouds.

I went back to the city after that weekend and didn’t come home for a few weeks. The movement of bodies in Manhattan had made me anonymous, and although I usually liked that, I felt forgotten. My twin-sized bed did not welcome me back, but tolerated my weight as I continued to scream. My pillow was misshapen and flattened. The words passing from me during class discussions were barely coherent, and I stopped reading. I sunk into the moving darkness as the trains thundered down the leaking tunnels below the city, only surfacing for the flickers of life on the subway platforms. I went to work and dropped some plates on the way to the kitchen. The embarrassment carried me to the floor in the employee bathroom with heaving throes.

It was December and I felt the emptiness. The heaviness of life had left me. There was nothing. The phone was ringing and I answered the call. I heard the words, but they felt inaccessible behind the static of my want to misunderstand. Art is dead. He died by suicide. He had used a rope and let the heaviness that had left me bring him closer to the ground, or slightly above it.

I walked weakly, and almost breathless, to the train after having packed a bag of my belongings. Peering out the window on the Long Island Rail Road, I watched as the passing parking lots blended into mini-malls, service roads, and backyards. The sky was a bright pink as the sun set on the day when my friend died.

The funeral home’s parking lot was overflowing with cars. I parked my parent’s car near the supermarket across the street. Denir and I held hands as we walked up the stone path to the entrance.

When we entered, the dim lights from the wall lamps were casting a yellow glow across the room. There was a familiar group huddled together. The same party goers who had been heavy with drunkenness that past October were now sober with grief. We walked past the picture boards, the family members heaving heavy sighs, the casket — closed and wooden and polished.

I go home to lie in my childhood bedroom, the pink and green of the walls I had painted myself wrapping me in a dream and a soft blanket. I wake up with a startle triggered by a thought within myself. I look outside at the woods across the street. Art used to cut through them to reach the other side of town. He would walk past, a softness in the bend of his shoulders with a careful stride. He would slip into the space between the trees, his white shirt visible through the first few feet of the brush until the woods swallowed him. This is where he would exist. My mind could hold him. He wouldn’t disappear against the backdrop of my memory.

I focused on the spot where he would enter the woods. If this is where he exists, I can rewrite it and I can save him.

I was home again. I had been away for a while. The leaves that had not fallen from the trees were a deep orange. I walked among them, through an encasing arch that still reflected gold under the street lamps. I inhaled deeply and blew out a visible breath that shot out a few inches in front of me like a guide. This seaside town with its caverns of greenery enveloped me in a careful package. I was being delivered to a party.

The path in the woods that I followed let me out near my destination where I had often sang along to bad renditions of Pixies songs, thrown a basketball with an expectation to use it as a flirting technique, visited friends in the summer when everything was lathered with sunshine or the expectation that it would return the next day. I heard voices as I approached the stairwell, a familiar place where I felt at home. I turned to look down at Denir, an old friend, who had just told a joke and was shaking speedily as she often does when she laughs. She was hunched over, wrapping her arms around her knees and grasping onto her ankles, her deep laugh echoing in the structure of the concrete stairwell. I turned my direction to Art, who had just scoffed.

Art looked up, noticing me. His eyes looked sunken and tired. I had last seen him in the summer, under the cover of a warm night that had turned the sky navy blue. I remember sitting with him under a wide oak tree, brushing our arms together as we drank cans of beer in a hammock. We had been laughing at how aggressively drunk all the party goers were, their tie dye scarves sweeping around them as they danced.

We were shaking from our laughter and falling into each other. I noticed some ketchup on his cheek and wiped it off, my hand curving around his chin for a moment.

“Okay, time to get up!” Max yelled at us. “I want to sit in my hammock.”

I looked at Art and smiled. He returned my expression with the semblance of a frown. I grabbed his hand and we both pulled ourselves up from the hammock, unclapsing our hands once we were standing and losing each other in the crowd.

“Art, Denir,” I said, my voice full and jovial. I was happy to see them.

“Hi Coll,” Art nodded.

Denir turned around, her mouth dropping down excitedly. “Coll!” She exclaimed.

I moved down the steps toward Art, standing close to him to shield myself from the cold. The overwhelming loudness of the party through the metal door asked us to join. We entered, through the smoke, the laughing guests, the people from my teenage years who sat among the litter of beer cans. Max walked over to me, losing his balance and pressing himself against the wall to pretend that he was not drunk. I said hello, politely, and made my way over to Art.

“How have you been?” I smiled. I genuinely wanted to know.

“Been doing the same shit,” He said. “Looking for work again.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll find something. You always do.” I thought of us on the hammock again, that past summer, under the trees, the loudness of the party guests drowning us as we melted into our own puddle.

“I haven’t been able to sleep.” He said, his eyes shifting to check my reaction.

“Is everything okay?” I asked him because I wanted to know. I would not move away unless I knew that he was comforted and aware that I loved him.

“I’m just depressed,” He said, looking down. I moved toward him, closing the space between us.

“What’s wrong?” I wasn’t whispering, but my voice was low.

He moved even closer to me, pressing his chest against mine and leaning his mouth to hover outside of my ear. I listened intently. I heard him. His chest was rising and lowering against mine until we moved in unison, our breaths identical. When he was done telling me what had been going on, he stepped away from me.

“Can we walk together?” I asked.

We walked through the night under the arching trees that showed it was still Fall even if the cold had fooled us. On the walk home, I told him about how rigorous my course load was, and how tired I had been from its weight. He told me about having been fired at his job because someone had made up a rumor about him and the manager had heard. We walked with each other through the opening of the trail beside the train tracks. He held my hand as we came upon a dip or a bump from the leaves that padded the path. I could smell the leaves, their scent forced out by the wet air. I would like to lie in them with Art. Here, right now. I squeezed his hand until he squeezed back. I could disappear here with you.

We exited the trail, the light spilling from the parts of night that are always warm — a lamp on a stoop, the glow of stars, the light through a child’s bedroom window that had been left on by their mother.

We stood at the edge of the driveway. As he continued to hold my hand, he turned to me to grab on to the other. From the street lamp above us, light spilled onto him, revealing a dusting of freckles on the forefront of his face. He stepped forward again, like he had done in the basement, removing the space between us. As he leaned in, I moved forward, my lips hooking onto his, our arms risen, our fingers finding the space between the others and collapsing our hands together. After we had separated, he looked at me with a deep stare, his eyes full of moisture and warmth.

“I’ll call you.” I told him. I meant it.

He walked up his front walk, the rising and falling of his back encased by the portrait of the brown structure of his home, the night sky dotted with stars that had broken through the clouds. The rising and falling of his back is what I remember — his breath. It is what will exist in me.

If I replay this moment in my head, then perhaps there could be a different ending, one that is not so encapsulated by regret. I can forgive myself for not comforting him when he needed someone. I had used his fire for life to feel joyous during happier moments when he had energy to give. I can feel regret that I had not given the little energy I had left to him when he had been drained of his own by life. I can forgive myself for not forgiving him for not living by a moral code that I had also broken. I can forgive myself for not understanding that I can move toward a place of redemption if that is the life I choose. I can carry him with me and I can tell people about the summer we shared together, getting to know each other, and how much he made me laugh.

My eyes refocus on the woods across the street where Art would often disappear and reappear from. I looked at the opening between the trees and tried to imagine his shape against them, his dark brown hair escaping against the backdrop of night. If I focus enough, I can restart the fantasy. I can keep him here with me. I can rewrite the story and we can rewind. In my childhood room, I turn off the lights and whisper through the glass.

I’m still here. Where are you?

Find me elsewhere through my Linktree.

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“I don’t understand they/them pronouns,” she said plainly. Through the Zoom screen I could see her face, seemingly without intentional malice but familiar with its confidence. Emmy had a way of acting as if whatever she said could be displayed on a large instructional board, her experience as a PhD student and adjunct professor implicating her status as the smartest person in the room — especially when we were in bars, drinking heavily — in the theory that existed in her own head. I sat there frozen just for a moment. This is the comment that usually came from people who I didn’t know, on the social media platform formerly named Twitter, from anonymous accounts. The displayed ignorance of “I don’t understand” usually did not mean that they did not understand, but that they did not want to understand. It usually was a lead up to someone not understanding further, a debate of our experience as non-binary and trans people — an ongoing conversation where they would refuse to understand, even if we educated them. But I had known Emmy for over ten years. She had seen the worst parts of my life: when I was unhoused, living on a couch in a dark place where I had been abused, with few options and nowhere else to go. She stayed my friend when many others left. She was not an anonymous internet caricature nor was she someone who was using anonymity to hide their own bigotry. She was my friend, at least she was then.

“What do you mean you don’t understand them?” I asked once I had found the words stuck in my throat that were being subdued by the beating of my chest, the movement rising through my body.

“I just don’t understand them. It’s not grammatically correct.” She said this matter-of-factly.

“They are grammatically correct. ‘They’ has been used as a singular pronoun for centuries.” I responded, waiting for her to gain the understanding she claimed to lack.

Her face changed from self assured defiance to confused wonder. “Since when?”

“You can look in the dictionary and ‘they’ is described there as a person of an unspecified gender. I studied the English language and its history in college. And, people will use ‘they’ as a singular pronoun when they are discussing someone of whom they do not know the gender in regular conversation all the time without realizing. My college professor would correct all my papers when I was extraneously writing ‘he or she’ or ‘him or her’ to ‘they.’ ‘She’ and ‘he’ have been used as pronouns in a culturally acceptable way, to reinforce the gender binary.”

She looked at me, her mouth widening with wonder. I thought she would drop it here and let it go. But Emmy disliked losing a debate. She disliked it so much that she would instead revert to insulting anyone who disagreed with her, not with direct insults usually, but by consistently dismissing their valid claims and replacing them with the insistence that she is correct.

She said, “No, but I understand fae/faer pronouns or neopronouns. It’s just that ‘they’ doesn’t make sense since it’s plural.”

I felt the anger within me rising in my chest, replacing the anxiety I felt with a familiar bravery. My anger could often make me braver than I ever felt when I was not angry, in a situation where I was being dismissed.

“You shouldn’t be speaking over a trans person about their pronouns. I already explained it to you and what I am saying is factual and correct.” I said this to her with my voice loud, my face stern through the screen.

Her mouth widened again, in faux shock or wonder or whatever it meant to pretend to be ignorant instead of a blatant asshole.

“Who’s trans? You?” She said this, questioning again.

“I’m non-binary, which is under the trans umbrella,” I told her. That is who I am.

She nodded her head as if she understood and then said, “Yes, well, being non-binary is different than being trans. There’s a ‘Big T’ and there’s a ‘small t’ in queer theory. I’m a queer theory professor and I know this.” Emmy is a cis woman who had been teaching family psychology for a few years as an adjunct professor. She had never mentioned teaching a “queer theory” class, although her dissertation, which she had been writing for years, involved the exploration of gender identity and toxic masculinity. I now wondered based on this conversation if she is qualified to explore that topic.

“I’m trans and non-binary people can be trans. It is not up to cis people to decide if someone is trans or not. Trying to speak over a trans person about their pronouns is transphobic. You should talk to trans people and you should listen to them rather than speak over them.” I was speaking very loudly at this point, the anger clear in my voice.

“Why are you mad?” She said back to me, with shock.

Why wouldn’t I be mad? It is easy for someone who has always dismissed the stories and ideas of others under the guise of faux superiority to ask why someone is mad when she had spent a large part of our catch up conversation invalidating my experience. For a long time, I felt as if I owed Emmy. She had been there for me when my life had been pulled apart by abusers. But, looking at her through the screen, I felt as if I was seeing her clearly for the first time. We were catching up after a while. I had not seen her or spoken to her since before the pandemic had started, and we were a year and a half into it. I had shut myself out from the world in my small apartment in New York City after the first wave of Covid-19 hit. My roommate at the time was a hospital worker. We hardly saw anyone except for our romantic partners at the time. Emmy had disappeared as many had and left the city to stay with family in a faraway state. It was May 2021 and she was planning to return to the city soon — to her apartment that was walkable from mine.

The last time I saw her was at a bar that I would go to sometimes after work in midtown, Manhattan. We were meeting up after a long absence. I did not realize it at the time, but I had been avoiding her. It was the fall of 2019 and we were at a small table that was placed in a hallway just diagonal from the bar. She rushed in with her heavy coat on and swung it over the back of her chair. We sat across from each other, our draft beers foggy in glasses like the steam smeared on the windows. As we caught up, I started to explain to her how I had made progress with my complex-PTSD. I had worked through the situation with the man who had raped me when I was unhoused, vulnerable, and very young. He had taken advantage of me a few times prior to a violent and non-consensual incident. The last time I saw Emmy before this, we had run into him at a bar. I do not think he was there by chance. My suspicion is that he followed us. We both knew the bartender who was working that night and I had written on a Facebook post to him that I would be at the bar. I had run into this man, the rapist, a handful of times in the months prior, after not seeing him for about seven years. Soon after, I had run into him on the street as I was leaving my doctor’s office, and at a different pub more than once. I had a fawn trauma response when I saw him. As I physically shook, my anxiety rising, I acted as if everything was fine. It was not. I was terrified. In the aftermath of his abuse, his ex-girlfriend harassed me for years through messages. I heard through the grapevine that he eventually physically abused her, and she ended up in the hospital. When he turned up at the bar we were at, I was fearful and I asked Emmy to ignore him. She agreed for a bit. But then, Emmy continued to drink more and more. She had told me more than once over the years that she would black out regularly while drinking, to the point where people would think she was fine because she would be acting somewhat coherent, but she would have no memories of events that took place while she was in this state. Emmy eventually said something to this man — this rapist — and the girl who was with him, about his abuse. They both became angry and claimed that she was lying. What else would he do in such a situation? Abusers do not admit to who they are especially when they are holding prey in their hands. The night ended with his girlfriend attacking my friend Emmy, and the two of us running around a downtown Manhattan corner in the cold, collapsing into a doorway together and hugging. She said “I’m sorry but I hate what he did to you.” After I parted ways with her and was on the subway home, I received a call from him, which I did not answer, and then, threatening messages, one in which he asked for my location. I did not even realize that he still had my number. Months later, I forwarded those messages and my experience of his abuse to his job.

As we sat down at the bar, for the first time after parting ways with each other on the subway platform the night of that past incident, I explained to Emmy what I had done and how it felt good. I worked through the situation in therapy and reached out to someone, a company head at his employer, who I learned through our conversation, was also a domestic violence survivor, to let her know that she had a rapist on her staff–that I had been abused, that he had abused other people I knew, and that he was a serial rapist. Emmy said bluntly when I told her this: “I thought we were done talking about him.” I could not believe what I was hearing. I was talking about my progress and growth, and about outing my abuser. When I did, I had the support of my local community. Talking about it was healing for me. I felt like I was finally healing from the trauma of years past.

I became enraged, that anger in my throat, the old bravery I reserved for the most disrespectful interactions: “How dare you. I went through months of c-PTSD flashbacks. I could think of nothing but being attacked by him again after he sent me those threats. And you offered nothing but instigation with him after I asked you not to say or do anything. And when I called you on the phone to explain what he was saying and that he was threatening me, you said ‘I do not care about him.’ Well, I care. Because he didn’t go after you because he knows that you do not care. He went after me because I was once his victim. And I care.”

She looked shocked, her face frozen, not the same faux and mocking, widened mouth wonder she was expressing while on a Zoom call a year and a half later. She only said, “I’m sorry.”

A few weeks after our Zoom call in 2021, Emmy invited me out for the Pride Parade in New York City. It was summer and the heat was sticky and heavy as the sun shined down on us. We sat outside drinking beers at a location where we had met a few times before. There was a hotdog restaurant across the street where we would catch up before a drink. That was before I was a vegetarian. Emmy and I had been drinking and chatting for a short while. We began to discuss current politics, how the president was handling things (note: he wasn’t). She did not agree. I began to talk about trans issues and how cis lesbians are often exclusionary to trans women, and how they had been exclusionary to me as a bisexual and pansexual person. She is a cis lesbian and immediately began to ramble on with her own perspective that I will not repeat, because she was once again parroting blatant bigotry. I recalled that Emmy was once bigoted to me about my bisexuality, years before, as we chain-smoked and drank on the rooftop patio Airbnb in Brooklyn where her sister was temporarily staying. She told me I was not gay enough because I had not yet had many serious relationships with women. Looking back, neither had she, and those comments felt like projection. That is often where criticism is coming from: the mirror that someone can not help looking into if it is nearby.

I began to openly disagree with her comments. She continued to explain how I was not actually trans because I am non-binary. I knocked her Red Bull can off the table and got up and left with my things. She chased me around the corner and gasped about how long we had been friends. She apologized and I agreed to stay. Another non-binary person showed up and they told us their pronouns, and I responded with mine. Our eyes locked briefly and we smiled at each other. Emmy misgendered this person we did not know a few times, until eventually they left with their friends. Two women passed by our table to chat with us and while she was dragging her cigarette, Emmy insulted one of them to tell her that she was not as hot as her friend (clearly, fuckgirl negging). Who was this person? I did not know this drunken fool. Or, at least my perception had shifted. People change. I certainly had. I realized on this final day of our friendship that Emmy was not someone I wanted to know any longer. Sometimes, it happens like that. People show you a version of themselves that is not aligned with the values that you grow into or they grow into beliefs that you never had. You realize with enough self respect that you deserve better and so do others. You stop making excuses for all the bad behavior and when you think of the old memories in a cloud of smoke that is no longer yours, you remember how miserable you were when you first met her in comparison to how happy you are now. I realized that I did not owe Emmy for how she helped me when I was younger. We do not owe anyone for their kindness. If we return it, then that is genuine. If it is given without expectation, that is truly kind. If something is expected of us in exchange for kindness, that is manipulation.

I do not talk to Emmy. I blocked her number. I moved across the country. I will not pick up the phone for her. My life has gotten better since I stopped entertaining the thoughtless prattle of people like Emmy. They are not better than me, or you. You are who you say you are, regardless of what anyone else says.

Read the story about my aforementioned sexual assault on Genre Urban Arts: Hardly Breathing, But I Exist

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I was one of the speakers at the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico last night for Transgender Day of Remembrance, which takes place today. I decided to share my words:

On Transgender Day of Remembrance, we remember all the transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people who have been murdered as a result of transphobia. We just spent a whole week bringing awareness to who we are, and while I am proud to be non-binary and genderqueer and trans–I do think those words encompass the parts of who I am I didn’t fully understand until I grew older–I do not know why we need to show all the sides of our humanity, sensitivities, and inner worlds to convince people not to kill us. I think bringing awareness to our lives helps to shed some of the ignorance and combat a bit of the abusive narrative that has been crafted with the intention of driving hate towards us and our community, but I do not know why it is necessary to convince people that we deserve the same chance at life as cisgender people. I do not blame trans people who are tired and don’t have the strength to stand up and convince people to see them for who they really are, after days, weeks, months, years of being misgendered and deadnamed and asked invasive questions that only a person who is comfortable dehumanizing others asks.

I know we are not the only community that faces discrimination and I hope we can also look into ourselves and challenge the biases we face within, and stand up for trans and queer people who are subjected to transphobia and racism, and xenophobia.

I am happy that I have found communities who are aware of how important it is for me to be seen as myself, people who correct themselves when they mumble “she” rather than “they” and just move on, so I do not have to do emotional labor with them that leads me to comforting them for feeling bad. I am lucky to work in an environment that allows me to use my new name and pronouns. I am happy to live independently and away from family members who were emotionally abusive and callous. I know not everyone has this distance from people who refuse to learn or see them. I hope that others can find distance from their abusers, respect in the workplace, and comfort in their personal lives, because that type of space is life saving and it is also possible. I hope that those who feel distant from that future can find places to exist intermittently that are not judgmental and harsh, because people should not wait to feel noticed and seen. There should be constant things to look forward to–not distant pipe dreams that may or may not happen. I hope that I can give space and conversation to those who need it and to share my own time, food, and resources.

I want people to be aware but I also want people to speak up when they see someone bullying or attacking a trans person. I want people to intervene and to refuse to accept the harassment of people within our communities. To take that awareness and make it visual, keeping their eyes and ears open for the possibility of change, rather than waiting until next year when their eyes are open again for one week. When someone calls another on a transphobic comment and explains what they did wrong, I want them to be aware that they can apologize, and learn, and grow, and that they’re not an ally if they only like trans people when they are simply agreeing with them. People can mess up without reframing their whole lives, unless they take that mistake and turn it into a persona that just becomes a personality, with no blame realized or taken with the intention of growth. Growth is about making decisions and consistently working to follow through with them, it’s about treating people as humans even when an individual has made them feel badly. You can be angry without discriminating against people. I want the definition of awareness to be an image: when one sees a trans person being harassed in public, to stand up and tell the harasser to sit the fuck down. To advocate for change within their own communities, to not accept biases to be passed across the table like bread on holidays and during family dinners, to challenge the people they love most and suggest that they can be better. I want that awareness to drive people to sign up for the newsletters of trans journalists like Erin Reed, and learn the propaganda talking points, how they were crafted, who is crafting them, to do the research like we all have so that we can defend ourselves and are not the only people combatting the misinformation that swirls around us like clouds, stormy and encompassing, the fog making it hard to see. It’s important to be aware, but it’s even more important to be ready to do something with that awareness, so that we have less people to remember and more to spend our time learning about, noticing, admiring, appreciating, seeing, giving space to not be seen, if that is what they want, giving them a place to hide when they need it, giving them a space to be comfortable and seen but without all the hate. I hate talking about being aware without the intention to build something with new knowledge. I also acknowledge my own privilege in people not always seeing my queerness until they really have to talk to me. It is a sad truth that there’s a privilege in not being seen for who I am in a world that is so hateful. But I shouldn’t have to hide either away. It’s hiding who we are that can sometimes make living insufferable, and letting people be who they are, without challenging them or nitpicking or asking questions that are focused with judgment, is also important. Today we remember the transgender people who should have been given a longer time living as they are, after battling to get there. I know I will not forget the world I want for all of us.

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On August 21st, the Vote to Stop Cop City Coalition said that it had collected 104,000 signatures in support of the referendum to allow Atlanta voters decide the fate of the planned police training center, Rough Draft Atlanta reported. It is concerning that city officials have tried to subdue voices from the community who would be directly affected by the police training facility being so close to their homes. This suppression of community voices is not only an issue for the people of Atlanta, Georgia, but a widespread issue that sets a precedent for how people can and will be treated if they speak out against their rights being forcibly removed. If we cannot peacefully challenge the state’s decisions even when it is clear that its interests are not aligned with the community’s values and concerns, and more aligned with corporate interests and the interests of people in power who desire authoritarian control, then is it unreasonable to assume that our rights will be stripped away? If the reaction to a community challenging a police training facility being built near their homes is for that community to be further suppressed by police through the use of domestic terrorism charges that do not align with the facts of their actions and events that took place, then we can assume that the state is acting in desperation to enforce obedience through unfair punishment and tactics. We cannot call our country free if the people within it cannot voice their opinions against local state enforced projects that directly affect their communities and families. In May 2023, it was reported that the Atlanta Police Department proposed a budget of about $247 million for the upcoming fiscal year, which is an increase of $11.7 million from last year, or 4.66%. With the increased budget, the Atlanta Police Department intends to hire more officers, and install more cameras, increasing surveillance around a local community that has already voiced its opinion against an increased police presence. It seems that the city of Atlanta and its officials are not prioritizing the needs and wants of the community. This is not consistent with any idea that relates to democracy or a democratic process.

On August 26th, a protest occurred in New York City to stand in solidarity with the activists in Atlanta who are challenging the construction of Cop City. Workers World reported that the event took place to stand in opposition against the Atlanta police, who traveled to New York City to recruit New Yorkers to become cops. New Yorkers are familiar with the suppression of community wants and needs by the local city officials and the NYPD, the most overfunded police department in the country. Currently, New York City residents are dealing with local city officials suppressing their rights. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has given NYPD officers permission to harass unhoused New Yorkers with his 11-point legislative agenda. The NYPD are also known to violently suppress protests and violate the rights of New Yorkers. Meanwhile, their presence is meant to threaten and subdue the community rather than protect New Yorkers, as I have demonstrated and discussed through my research on alternatives for police. Vera Institute’s report on the New York City Police Department shows that the NYPD budget had grown 18 percent over the five years prior to 2020 despite New York City’s population remaining fairly constant at 8.3 million people.

Additionally, despite the declines in arrests and crime, the overall NYPD budget in 2020 swelled to 5.6 billion. After the 2020 protests, where the NYPD and other police departments across the country felt overwhelmed by the public support against them, their power challenged by people who were willing to stand up to them in the streets, city and state officials in various cities did not want to feel challenged in this way ever again. In January, The City reported that the New York Police Department had already overspent on their budget halfway through the fiscal year. Regardless of what city officials claim as a reasonable budget, the city budgets are unrealistic on paper and the budget gaps are growing. The New York Police Department is often given special flexibility, its overtime for police officers massively extending past their allocated budget. Why would the city continue to irresponsibly spend on the police department when data on crime shows that more police officers are not needed? There is no purpose but to enforce control over a population and to anticipate subduing members of the community if they dare to stand up to the city’s tactics to abuse and harass members of New York City’s local community. Similar to city officials in Atlanta, New York City officials are ignoring the public opinion about a higher police presence. In response to the police in New York City being overfunded, other necessary resources for the community including education, libraries, and sanitation, have been historically underfunded. The cuts inevitably will be made elsewhere.

According to The Marshall Project, there are now approved massive investments in police training facilities in Newark, New Jersey ($49 million), Port St. Lucie, Florida ($24.7 million) and Corpus Christi, Texas ($21 million). The Texas Tribune reported: “The Texas Department of Public Safety wants $1.2 billion to turn its training center north of Austin into a full-time statewide law enforcement academy — starting with a state-of-the-art active-shooter facility that would need a nearly half-billion-dollar investment from Texas taxpayers next year.” Their justification comes from the tragedy that occurred in Uvalde, Texas, when police officers stood around and allowed children to be murdered, rather than put their lives on the line to save them. There is not a more unjustifiable reason to give police departments more money when its officers have already proven that they are not capable of protecting the community during dangerous situations. Police departments continue to ask for more money to be used for “training” when local and state governments could instead provide communities with housing, proper healthcare, food, and necessities. Mariame Kaba explains, “police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues.” In her article, she quotes Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, from his interview with Jacobin. Vitale explains, “We’ve all grown up on television shows in which the police are superheroes. They solve every problem; they catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers. But this is all a big myth. This is not what police actually do. They’re not out chasing bank robbers or serial killers. The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.” Kaba clarifies, “We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.” The data also shows that police are not likely to help with preventing violent crimes, including sexual assault. We need to look for solutions outside of bolstering a police presence in our communities, because they are not making communities better. Depending on the carceral state to create a nonviolent and safe world, when the system itself perpetuates violence, is not based in reality.

These increased efforts for police “training” in “cop cities” is concerning because they are coming at a time when marginalized people across the country are being demonized by a fascist agenda through hateful and discriminatory legislation. Lawmakers in places like Texas and Florida are attempting to use bills that target trans and queer people to remove them from society, by either making their public existence illegal, removing their healthcare options, or demonizing us through an organized hate campaign. They are targeting individuals through legislation around curriculum and book bans. Most of the book bans are directed toward LGBTQIA+ authors and authors of color. Additionally, police officers will be the force behind the fascist laws that punish people who need abortion healthcare.

Throughout Texas, there is already systemic discrimination and abuse that is carried out by police officers and the departments and police unions that protect them. According to data collected from Vera Institute, “In 2018, the Austin Police Department made 24,350 arrests. Like most departments across the country the majority of these arrests were not made for serious violent incidents but for low level offenses. In fact, 83 percent of 24,350 arrests in 2018 in Austin were made for non-serious non-violent charges. These arrests are often made in response to situations that do not require police presence.” Additionally, In Austin, Texas, Black people were arrested at a rate 3.38 times higher than white people. In Fort Worth, Texas Black people were arrested at a rate 2.4 times higher than white people. In Houston, Texas, Black people were arrested at a rate 3.51 times higher than white people. In Dallas, Texas, Black people were arrested at a rate 2.63 times higher than white people. The police departments in Miami, Jacksonville, and Tampa do not release arrest data to the National FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) database, where Vera Institute pulls its data from. The Atlanta Police Department also does not release arrest data to the National FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) database. Vera Institute states that “all police departments should be required to regularly and publicly report data. To promote this kind of transparency and accountability, you can call on your local police department and elected officials to publicly report data to the UCR.” Additionally, Vera Institute’s data confirms that “more than 10.5 million arrests are made each year; 83 percent of these arrests are for non-serious non-violent crimes–instances that rarely require police presence. Although over policing is a national epidemic, the burden falls on communities of color, who are disproportionately targeted. Black people are arrested at a rate 2.26 higher than white people.” Stop Cop City and all cop cities or police training centers that are in the process of being constructed.

The local community in Atlanta, Georgia has spoken out against the construction of copy city on Weelaunee Forest while the city and its attorneys are devaluing their voices and moving forward with the project. Cop cities and higher police presences are not needed throughout the country. Communities should be cared for and given resources to grow and thrive, and not be subdued, threatened, and abused by systemic violence and oppression. If you are reading an article about the rise in “crime” that conveniently blames marginalized communities, like the unhoused, do you check the sources throughout? Have you double checked the data to see if it supports the claims being made? You should. Many claims are being made to create a narrative to justify abuse against vulnerable communities. Opportunists lie and it is up to you to not defend and support the justifications and propaganda that bolster oppression.

Sources and support to consider:

Atlanta Solidarity Fund

#Free Victor

Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter

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As opportunistic legislators and individuals have noticed an open window through which they can project their hate, they have turned their attention toward classrooms, where the most vulnerable people in our society are trying to learn and grow. Book bans have become more prevalent and those who are advocating for them and organizing the removal of books from classrooms and libraries have been focusing on banning books that include topics on race, gender and sexuality studies, and the Holocaust. Those advocating for these book bans want to force everyone in their paths and beyond to adhere to a strict social norm where the most privileged individuals maintain their status, and they are using their power to restrict books from classrooms and using information control to keep children from learning and thinking beyond a chosen structure. Book bans are on the rise: “PEN America recorded more book bans during the fall 2022 semester than in each of the prior two semesters.” PEN America reported that “25% (n=372) of individual books banned were connected to political pressure from elected or appointed officials. These officials wielded their government position to explicitly challenge books in ways that can intimidate and chill school administrators and educators.” Here is a searchable index that includes each documented book ban in Fall 2022. From July to December 2022, PEN America found “1,477 instances of individual books banned, affecting 874 unique titles.” While the uptick in book bans has been growing, it did not start last year.

CBS News reported that “between 2020 and 2022, the number of book titles that have been banned in U.S. libraries and schools spiked more than 1,100%, to more than 2,500.” In a recent segment from the news source, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, Director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, stated that the types of books that are being banned are books with LGBTQIA+ topics, books about the history of racism and slavery in the United States, and books that represent Black voices. The segment also discusses Ron DeSantis’ responsibility in pushing for censorship in Florida and the hate group Moms for Liberty, whose members are responsible for organizing many of the book bans, which have now occurred in 37 states. Cartoonist Art Spiegelman, referred to the group, which masquerades itself as advocating for “liberty,” as one that is, in reality, “for suppression” and “authoritarianism.” Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus, which is about the Holocaust, was banned last year by the McMinn County, Tennessee school board. Last month, Vero Beach High School removed Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation from classrooms “after a leader of Moms for Liberty in Indian River County raised an objection,” NBC News reports. In a segment from last month, the news source describes a new “district objection committee,” which includes nine members, a mixture of parents and district employees, which plans to challenge 250 titles in the future.

Making false claims about the literature that children are reading and using those claims to remove books from classrooms and libraries for all students will not help them to grow or learn. There is a reason why groups like Moms for Liberty are challenging books that include topics on the Holocaust and claiming that they are “inappropriate” for children. They do not want kids to know real history, or to have an opportunity to think for themselves. If kids cannot think for themselves, or understand that they have the option to form their own opinions, it is easier for their parents and guardians to control them. They do not care about the well-being of children. They desire to make their decisions for them, even if they are harmful. The main goal here is control. It is easier for lawmakers to control a populace if they have firm control of information that they can manipulate to present as the only valid form of education. Moms for Liberty members have claimed that they are trying to keep “pornography” out of schools. Meanwhile, they are turning their attention to books about the Holocaust, like Anne Frank’s Diary, which educate and inform on the atrocity, and claim that they are “inappropriate” for children. Their claim that a book about a Holocaust victim, Anne Frank, “minimizes the Holocaust,” does not make sense and only provides a way for them to dress up their bigotry as faux concern.

In the article “Data Analysis: Books Banned by the Nazis,” which explores “the authors, titles, and locations of books that were banned by the Nazis in 1935,” the author discusses the Reich Chamber of Culture, a government agency in Nazi Germany that was created by Joseph Goebbels, and “was meant to gain control over the entire cultural life in Germany” by “creating and promoting Aryan art consistent with Nazi ideals.” The article explains the types of book bans that were enforced: “The first type was for books that ‘threatened the Nazi culture’ and the second type was for books that were ‘unsuitable to fall into the hands of youth (children under the age of 18).’ These books also could not be shown in storefront windows or placed in bookstores ‘where the general public could find them.’” The people who are organizing and enforcing book bans today want to create strict societal norms and are using the same tactics that the Nazis used to make it happen. The Nazis used the enforcement of book burnings in an attempt to erase Jewish culture and history. The Nazis also targeted books about intersex, gay, and transgender people. Book Riot provides a history of the first book burning, which took place on May 6, 1933: “The Institute of Sexology was targeted by German students. The library of the Institute collected over 20,000 texts about intersexuality, homosexuality, and transgender people. Magnus Hirschfeld, the founder of the Institute, also performed the first gender confirmation surgery on Dora Richter, who died in 1933 and was most likely killed in the chaos of the book burning action. This initial step was part of the Nazi Party’s mission to ban all ‘deviant’ sexuality.” Jennifer Wolf, a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and the director of undergraduate programs at the GSE hosted a teach-in on book banning last spring. She discusses book bans and the types of books that Nazis burned in comparison to the types of books that are being banned today:

“The types of books that the Nazis wanted removed and burned were largely political, with ideologies opposed to Nazism, including books on race and sexuality. One of the first Nazi book burnings took place at a clinic that researched and performed gender confirmation surgery and housed a library of books on the subject. Today we find that book bans supposedly targeting a particular issue often go well beyond it. After the Texas House passed HB 3979, the so-called ‘critical race theory’ law, a state legislator sent a 16-page spreadsheet of 850 titles to the Texas Education Agency, asking if any of the schools had the books listed in order to verify compliance with the bill. But when we look closely at the titles on that list, the majority of the books on the list are about LGBTQ+ identity and sex education. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to the actual titles that are singled out, to see what the bans are really about.” Along with book bans, legislators have been targeting access to healthcare for transgender people in various states.

The bans on books are not an isolated issue. They are part of a coordinated effort to create a society where bigots wish to erase transgender and queer people, using similar tactics to the Nazis, by limiting the access to literature about us, while supporting propaganda that demonizes and normalizes violence against us, and removing our access to healthcare and safe places to live as our true selves. Anti-trans and anti-queer legislators have created and maintained the conditions for genocide. Groups like Moms for Liberty pretend that their efforts to advocate and organize for censorship are implemented with good intentions, but for those who have access to learn the true history of book bans, their behavior is transparent. Book Riot explains some of their dishonest organizing tactics here.

Coinciding with the ultimate goal of these organizers to create a culture of information control, in April, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed legislation that would regulate how schools and businesses address race and gender, otherwise known as the “Stop WOKE Act.” Earlier this year, DeSantis also supported proposals that would introduce restrictions on higher education in Florida. Florida Representative Alex Andrade (R), introduced HB 999 which would give the state control over which types of subjects and topics students are learning in the classroom. The original text included a passage that gave power to The Board of Governors to “provide direction to each constituent university on removing from its programs any major or minor in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems.” The updated duties outlined in this bill are using alternate wording, stating:

“The Board of Governors shall periodically review the mission of each constituent university and make updates or revisions as needed. Upon completion of a review of a constituent university’s mission, the board shall review existing academic programs for alignment with the university’s mission. The board shall include in its review a directive to each constituent university regarding its programs for any curriculum that violates s. 1000.05 or that is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, or economic inequities.”

Popular Information reported that programs like Women and Gender studies, of which 170 students at the University of Central Florida have chosen as a minor, would be targeted. Rather advocating for institutions to learn from the past and provide students with programs to help educate them about sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and beyond, which would help them to create a more inclusive world for themselves and their peers, legislators are attempting to control information in Higher Education by placing barriers that would keep specific subjects from being taught.

The source breaks down the bill further, describing the unclear language that is used to create ambiguity and fear. This is similar to many bills that have been introduced in various states from legislation that would strip trans people of their healthcare to laws that would give financial incentive to informants to report transgender people for performing in a public place. Their goal is to make it impossible for transgender people to exist in public spaces and take part in society. These legislators are using language that is ambiguous to disguise the laws they support as necessary and keep them open to interpretation when they are being used against their targets.

According to senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America Jeremy C. Young, HB 999 “would virtually end academic freedom, shared governance, and institutional autonomy at all Florida public colleges and universities, replacing them with an environment dominated by fear, with free expression and open inquiry hiding in the shadows, perpetually under siege.” The presentation of this legislation is an attempt to work toward the same goal as the purpose for controlling information in Florida schools through book bans. These lawmakers want to create a culture where only specific ideas are accepted, so that they can marginalize groups of people.

In February, The Duval County school district in Florida removed Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates because “it contained references to the racism Clemente experienced,” Education week reported. The district’s review process has been directed by HB 1467. Governor Ron DeSantis and Manny Diaz, the state education commissioner, “blamed districts for overreacting and removing books.” This is disingenuous and state legislators are responsible for creating a panic around these book bans. They are purposefully creating confusion around these issues so that they can deny accountability in cases where they feel it benefits them.

According to Education Week analysis, “since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism.” According to the analysis which breaks down the bills by state, in Missouri, bills have been filed this year that “give parents the right to monitor school curricula and other materials.” According to the data, in Ohio, “Bills that would have prohibited discussion of certain topics related to race and sex, forbid schools from awarding credit for student service learning with advocacy groups, and ban ‘any textbook, instructional material, or academic curriculum that promotes any divisive or inherently racist concept’ all failed to pass during the 2021 and 2022 sessions.” Again, these bills are being written in ways that allow them to be open to interpretation. Lawmakers are interpreting giving equal education and benefit to others as giving other kids, who already have resources, privileges, and support, less. Our society should not be built on hierarchies. People should not need to push others down to uplift themselves. Withholding information and learning tools from kids will not make them more informed. Learning about racism, sexism, transphobia, and other bigotries will make kids more knowledgeable about how to create a more inclusive world for everyone to feel safe and obtain equal opportunity. Having a variety of educational materials will help kids understand that they can form their own thoughts and opinions that extend beyond their parents and guardians. Kids who are disadvantaged by societal rules and bigotry should have materials to make them feel as if they are not alone and knowledge to know that the hate they are subjected to is not their fault.

In February, the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri challenged a new state law that “prompted schools across Missouri to order hundreds of books removed from their shelves.” The books included “were written by or about minority or LGBTQ individuals, but also include many graphic novels, human anatomy books and Holocaust history books.” Librarians were unsure of where they should draw the line and are fearing prosecution. A common but untrue idea that bigots enjoy circulating is that LGBTQIA+ individuals are inherently sexually deviant and they justify hate against us by labeling our sexualities and identities as being abnormal, as the Nazis did. They label our sexualities as deviant, and then assign the same label to us as individual beings, while we are existing outside of our sexual lives. If there are books that are being automatically banned because they are in the range of LGBTQIA+ literature, that is discrimination. Books that do not sugarcoat horrible atrocities like the Holocaust and slavery are simply factually correct. These events and institutions were horrific and therefore, if one is staying true to reality, these books will be filled with bad things. But Kids should learn about the real history of what happened. It will make them aware of work that needs to be done in our society to make sure that bigotries are addressed properly, and that racism and antisemitism are not accepted under any circumstances. In April, the Missouri House passed a budget that withheld funds from state libraries. This happened in response to the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association challenging the expansive book bans, MSNBC reported.

In Ohio, Senate Bill 83 has been introduced and is in committee and has been described as “an unwieldy omnibus of contradictory mandates” that “would not only enable but even require classroom-level intervention by state officials” by the American Historical Association. The organization explains that “the law requires teaching only six particular political documents in all US history courses” and that teaching only these documents “without comparing those documents to a wider range of what Americans have read, discussed, and debated, is the very definition of teaching ‘ideology.’” This does not sound different from the ultimate goal of legislators around the country who are trying to create a standardized way of thinking.

In September 2022, The Texas Tribune reported that Texas had banned more books than any other state in school classrooms and libraries. At the beginning of April, a federal judge in Texas ordered 12 books that were removed from public libraries, “many because of their LGBTQ and racial content,” to be placed back on the shelves within 24 hours, CNN reported. The report states that “seven residents sued county officials in April 2022, claiming their First and 14th Amendment rights were violated when books deemed inappropriate by some people in the community and Republican lawmakers were removed from public libraries or access was restricted.” The residents understood that these books were removed because of personal bias and discrimination. They are not the only ones fighting back. In the aforementioned segment from CBS News, Linda Johnson, President and CEO of Brooklyn, New York Public Library, explained how the library issued a country-wide press release for readers between the ages of 13 and 21 that stated if they couldn’t find the material they want to read in their school or libraries, that the Brooklyn library would give them access through their digital collection. The library has issued 6,200 free digital library cards and circulated over 100,000 books and other items through Books Unbanned. A teacher from Norman, Oklahoma placed QR codes to the digital collection from the Brooklyn Public Library on the bookshelves in her classrooms after a state law was passed that banned books. She says “Identities are not obscenities. Stories are not pornography.” There are various ways to get involved to advocate for free speech and to give a voice to the most vulnerable in our society.

Expansive and ongoing book bans in the United States have been increasing due to a coordinated effort by individuals who wish to implement a culture of control. They do not stand alone. They are organized and they are working together to target queer and trans people, non-white people, and those who do not want to fit onto a specific box constructed as a platform to perform. By withholding information and tools that children need to grow and think as individuals, they are attempting to shape the minds of kids to only accept ideas that have been pre-approved by legislators who are actively stripping the rights and access to healthcare from some of the most vulnerable groups. They have displayed that those who do not obey their carefully placed societal rules will be punished. The only way to stand up against them is to organize just as efficiently and to coordinate with neighbors and friends who want to protect the free speech of those who are currently being subdued.

ALA’s Top 13 Most Challenged Books of 2022

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Earlier in March, white supremacists, including Proud Boys and Nazis, targeted “Rock-n-Roll Humanist Drag Queen Story Hour” in Wadsworth, Ohio and harassed attendees. Emboldened by the narrative that is being drawn by anti-transgender legislation and opportunist bigots with platforms, these armed white supremacists went to the event, waving flags emblazoned with Nazi imagery and chanting threats. Nazis are aligning with the anti-trans narrative that has been carefully planned by legislators and religious zealots because the narrative has been formed from a fascist ideology. Those who use anti-trans talking points are parroting the language of fascists and those who do not stand up against them are cowering to Nazis and white supremacists, or gleefully joining them.

Recently, Mother Jones reported on the collection of leaked emails between anti-trans legislators, religious leaders, pseudo-medical organizations, and more, that showed a calculated plan to target transgender people, their access to medical care, and beyond by using fictitious storylines meant to stoke public outrage. Readers of the report will notice that the same talking points that bigots use while harassing transgender people (ie., the crafted ideas that there is no such thing as “cisgender” or “transgender”), because these ideas were carefully structured and chosen for the public to use as a weapon against trans people. The report also discusses how the individuals involved in the email chain specifically tried to counter provable facts that show that affirming trans kids’ gender identities lessens the rate of suicide for transgender youth. The Trevor Project provides data that shows that queer children who are threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy are more likely to attempt suicide. According to an article published in JAMA Open Access, that uses statistical analysis for its findings: “receipt of gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones, was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality over a 12-month follow-up.” Rather than centering the safety of the children who they claim to protect, the people who are a part of this email chain instead inserted their bigoted views into the national conversation and directly put trans and queer kids at risk. They do not care about children and their claims that they are worried about kids are blatantly disproven by their actions and hubris in thinking that their personal views that exist without evidence are more important than factual data. The article also mentions that accredited medical associations do support gender-affirming care and that studies show that gender-affirming care has led to better mental health outcomes for trans people. Additionally, the ongoing propaganda that is being used to justify anti-trans legislation and to encourage violence against queer and trans people has been challenged by U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH) and World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).

The Nazis who showed up to intimidate and harass attendees of the Drag Story Hour event in Ohio are not the only bigots who are threatening queer people in public places. In the aftermath of the attack against queer and trans people at Club Q, threats of violence by fascists should be taken seriously, including implicit threats by those who use their platforms to spread hate and disinformation against transgender people. Rolling Stone reported on Michael Knowles’ call for the eradication of transgender people. As a reminder, the use of the term “transgenderism” is a fascist dog whistle that attempts to paint trans people as followers of an ideology, when we transgender people are simply living as ourselves. Those who try to conflate “transgenderism” with trans people are not only attempting to mask their bigotry as they make hateful commentary against a specific group of people, but they also fall back on the aforementioned idea, circulated by the crafters of the current anti-trans propaganda, that our identities are not real. The idea itself is a tool that is being used to incite collective hatred against us. While those with far reaching media platforms should be held accountable for joining in on this hate, anti-trans legislation that is currently being introduced and passed, is being guided by lawmakers and state legislatures. While there has been an uptick in anti-transgender legislation that was padded and supported by a propaganda campaign whose sources have now been revealed, there has been a devastating number of bills introduced this year. Among them is HB 4378 which is a bounty hunter law that would allow people to report transgender individuals who are in a public space and collect a bounty of $5,000 for it. The wording within the bill is purposely being used to conflate a transgender person existing as themself with “performing drag” as many of these anti-trans laws are being written. They are meant to be open to interpretation so that they can be interpreted in a way that would criminalize transgender people. According to the way this bill is written, a “drag performance” means “a performance in which a performer exhibits a gender that is different than the performer’s gender recorded at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers and sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs in a lascivious manner before an audience.” Can a trans person perform karaoke or get on a public stage without this law being interpreted against them? Not only are these laws dangerous for transgender people, but these anti-trans laws will create strict public dress codes for anyone who wishes to dress outside of expected gender roles. Cis women should ask themselves if they would like to be prohibited from wearing pants in a public space, or if they would dislike being forced to wear a dress or skirt publicly, with no other options. In a state that is already violating people’s rights to reproductive care and has weaponized the law against them, do not put it past people using these laws to start restricting how you present yourself. If you are a cis woman, the law can also be interpreted to be used against you if a person in the public space where you are existing uses misogynist ideology to decide that you are not acting in the role you are assigned.

The anti-trans legislation does not stop with Texas. Earlier in March, Florida released SB 1674, a bathroom ban that would charge a transgender person who is using the bathroom of their gender identity with a crime. A bill that has passed in Florida, SB 254 this past month as reported by the Florida ACLU, “undermines providers of healthcare, threatening medical providers with criminal sentences for helping transgender youth access life-saving healthcare,” “prohibits any allocation of state funds for such care (which means any medical care paid for in whole or part by the state, like Medicaid or state employee plans),” and “enables Florida courts to interfere with custody determinations from other states if the child is physically present in Florida and a parent or guardian is seeking gender-affirming healthcare in another state.” The ongoing anti-trans legislation that is being introduced and passed in Florida paired with book bans and Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill is creating unsafe conditions for queer and trans people. The propaganda that is being pushed by the Florida state legislature relies on sexualizing queer and trans people without their consent and conflating sexual themes found in media with sexual orientation and gender identity. Queer people are not inherently sexual for existing in a public place. We are simply people. If religious zealots and bigots are interpreting our existence as sexual, then this is their personal issue that they need to work through with themselves. Conflating books about and by queer people with being inappropriate on the basis of our orientations and sexualities is discriminatory. Branding the queer and trans community with a reputation of being groomers is a lie that is being used to direct violence against us. If religious zealots would like to protect children from groomers, they should look within their own communities and address the abuse that takes place in their churches. They should address the number of laws that allow minors to be married throughout our country. They will not because they do not actually care. Their fabricated outrage to “protect the children” is manufactured as a disguise for their bigotry. Kids do not become gay because they are in proximity to queer and trans people who are existing in a public space. Kids will not become gay from learning about queer and trans people. But queer kids will not feel alone and will not feel as if there is something wrong with them if there are characters within the stories they read who act as they do. If they cannot see themselves in the media they watch and the books on shelves around them, they will feel shame, of which many religious zealots love to reinforce. Many bigoted communities try to erase queer people to normalize this shame, which is in direct conflict with what data shows is best for kids. Denying queer people from being who they are is an abusive tactic.

Other states that have introduced or passed anti-trans legislation that uses similar tactics of pretending to protect children and conflating drag performers with transgender people include Kentucky, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, North Dakota, Arkansas, and Georgia. Erin Reed, who reports on anti-transgender legislation, has an Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Map that shows states that are most safe for trans people and states that are least safe currently, and takes note of states that might be in danger of becoming less safe and states that are likely going to become safer depending on upcoming laws.

While there is a concerning amount of anti-trans legislation being passed and trans people are at great risk in different states throughout the country, legislation has passed that will protect transgender people who are seeking gender affirming care in other states. Earlier this month, Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, signed an executive order that protects and supports transgender people in the state and also protects transgender people from outside of the state who are seeking gender affirming care within Minnesota. It is a sanctuary state and every state should follow its example. In New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law HB7, which protects gender affirming care and abortion and prohibits public bodies from interfering with either. Colorado has introduced SB 188, which would protect people who receive reproductive healthcare and gender affirming care within the state of Colorado from extradition. West Virginia adjourned Sine Die and 17 anti-trans bills failed, including a drag ban, legal health discrimination, forced misgendering, book bans, and a birth certificate ban. In Maryland, the Trans Equity Act or HB 0283 just passed out of committee. It would ensure that Medicaid would cover gender affirming care for low-income transgender people. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, has also vetoed an anti-transgender sports bill for the third year in a row.

While cowards and bigots continue to align with Nazis and scapegoat and target trans and queer people, people are showing up to stand in solidarity with those who are being targeted. In January, the John Brown Gun Club joined Boston DSA and other activists to protect queer people and attendees of a Drag Story Hour event. In New York City this past month, the right wing extremist group Proud Boys, whose local group stood in alignment with the Nazis who targeted the Drag Story Hour in Wadsworth, Ohio, were challenged by counter protesters who were defending the event. Conceding to Nazis, transphobes, bigots, and all who align with them will not do us any good. You are simply cowering and joining their ranks, or you are standing with us which means loudly standing against them.

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The recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio has disrupted the lives of residents in the town and in the surrounding areas. The train crash has led to one of the largest environmental disasters of our time, as noxious chemicals like carcinogenic vinyl chloride have polluted the water, air, and land. The company responsible for the derailment has already not lived up to its promises to reimburse those directly affected by the crash for its damages. Residents have been told that it is safe for them to return to the area after Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro ordered an immediate evacuation in a one-mile by two-mile area surrounding East Palestine while Norfolk Southern Railroad carried out a controlled release of the vinyl chloride, a process that involves the burning of the rail cars’ chemicals. The EPA has conducted air monitoring and water sampling and has reported unsafe conditions in the area. The EPA’s report includes testing that proves the materials released during the derailment were detected in samples from a few streams, creeks, and the Ohio River, and materials related to the incident were observed entering storm drains. The Lever reported that “The American Association of Railroads (AAR) — a lobbying group to which Norfolk Southern has long been a dues-paying member — in particular fought the ECP braking standards” and claimed it “would cost them about $3 billion — or roughly 2 weeks of their operating revenue in a typical year.” The Lever article expands on the importance of ECP brakes and why they would make safety conditions better. With the proper safety measures, better conditions, staffing, and benefits for rail workers, environmental disasters that disrupt the lives of entire communities could be avoided. The argument against these safety conditions and better conditions for workers is entirely guided by corporate greed.

I spoke to union staff representative Steven Manicastri and Part-Time Lecturer at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, about the disrespect for workers’ rights that partially led to this catastrophe. Manicastri explained: “The railroad workers who were blocked from striking by Joe Biden, who has been called ‘the most pro labor president in America,’ were looking for more safety. They wanted paid leave, sick days, but they are on call 24/7 and they have no time for themselves. If they get sick, their time off is unpaid. Protections were removed and relaxed because the railroad industries advocated for it. This could’ve been prevented.” Manicastri expanded on his analysis of the situation: “They wanted more safety and staff, and they had less time to do maintenance and check things. The working conditions are so unsafe that they ended up causing a huge environmental disaster.” Manicastri, who is familiar with labor law and history, explained why the federal government can decide if rail workers can strike or not.

“Railroad workers are governed by a different set of rules than most workers. They’re governed under the 1926 Railway Labor Act and because of it the federal government has the ability to approve for these workers to go on strike. It is this way because throughout the 1800s to the early 1900s railroad workers engaged in numerous labor actions over union recognition, the 8 hour workday, pay, and more, threatening the profits of not just the railroad industry but the entire capitalist class. The US government routinely sent militias and the National Guard to break the strikes on behest of the owners of the company since a rail strike can lead to major disruptions of the economy.” The Great Railway Strike of 1877 was a massive strike that spread to a dozen states and erupted from wage cuts during a depressed economy. The government sent federal troops to quell the strike. The strike, which started from unfair business practices that resulted in the violation of workers rights, ultimately set the stage for stricter federal regulations of railroads to avoid blockages of transportation and commerce. The Railway Labor Act set up federal regulations on collective bargaining for rail workers and “provided for the creation of a mediation apparatus and empowered the president of the United States to seek a cooling-off period for parties to a railroad labor dispute” (Cengage, Encylopedia.com). While the conditions of a strike that took place more than a century ago are not exactly the same as they are now, there are similarities from lacking benefits for workers to workers struggling during a depressed economy that has led to job cuts and more demanding shifts for them. PBS reported that railroads “have eliminated nearly one-third of their jobs over the past six years as they overhauled their operations.” Rail workers have been more strained and unable to perform their jobs in the best ways possible because they do not have the benefits to keep them rested and they are subjected to unsafe conditions. These practices are being controlled by railroad lobbies and laws that were set up to prevent workers from disrupting the economy are now being used by the current political leadership to prioritize profits for railroad lobbyists over workers. Manicastri said it directly: “Those who blocked the strike are doing the work for the capitalist class.” Rather than advocating for workers, and adding the sick time and benefits that rail workers wanted, Joe Biden and Congress ignored workers’ needs and aided in continued unsafe conditions for rail workers. As experts at Rutgers put it: “By pre-cancelling the strike, the federal government effectively sides with the employers and wealthy shareholders at the expense of the workers. These are not the actions of a ‘pro-labor’ president.” Soon after the federal government abandoned the push for safer conditions for rail workers, this massive train derailment has led to an environmental disaster that has affected inhabitants of East Palestine and the surrounding areas. We need to prioritize the fight for workers rights and we can expect that government officials will not join us without critique of and pressure against their careless policy decisions.

“It was just released that union density in the U.S. went down which is wild since we’re having so much more organizing, and 70% of young people report being for unions and that’s the highest favorability rate we’ve had in a long time. We have the support and the labor unions as a whole need to have a vision on how to use this momentum,” Manicastri says. The U.S Board of Labor Statistics reported this past January that “the percentage of workers represented by a union was 11.3 percent in 2022, down by 0.3 percentage point from a year ago. Workers represented by a union include both union members (14.3 million) and workers who report no union affiliation but whose jobs are covered by a union contract (1.7 million).” Manicastri expanded on recent decisions made by the federal government that coincide with its anti-union stance. “They just recently passed a resolution in Congress which is condemning socialism, and plenty of democrats voted for that bill, including democrats who got support from unions, and if you’re a union supporting democrats who vote for stuff like this–Medicare for All, etc, anything can be construed as socialism–you’re harming the labor movement by supporting these democrats who are voting. This happened during McCarthyism and the labor movement expelled all communists, socialists and anarchists from their ranks, became what it is today, bureaucratic professional unions that hardly ever use their leverage. The labor movement is having a resurgence because there’s a larger willingness to go on strike.”

There are workers in various industries currently organizing unions to protect themselves against unfair labor practices by their employers. Jacobin recently reported on the harsh union busting practices that Temple University has used against the graduate workers who are unionizing there, including taking away their healthcare and tuition remission. These tactics are used to intimidate workers and to squash their unionizing efforts. Higher Education graduate worker unions have been forming more in recent years.

Manicastri was among the initial group of graduate workers who organized a union at University of Connecticut. He gave some background on the initial steps he and other graduate workers took to form the union there. “I come from graduate union organizing so it’s similar to what’s happening with Temple University because it’s that type of workforce. We started as a small committee of 12–15 graduate workers, a group composed of each discipline in the university so when we started we were like ‘let’s meet, let’s talk’ and then it became finding a union. We shopped around. We initially were going to go with the Communication Workers of America Union until the rep told us to go with United Auto Workers union because they had more political power and those are connections we’d want. We had 12–15 people and we were like how do we talk to the other 2000 graduate workers? We needed to see who was going to be in our bargaining unit, who is performing the same type of work. Once we had that we identified a good number of people, we also pushed the state of Connecticut legislature to pressure the university to stay neutral while we had grad workers sign union cards. We had a majority of 70% in 2 months. There was a state law that public employees could automatically form a union if they could demonstrate a majority through a card check instead of having to wait for employer recognition or undergo a NLRB election.”

“Organizing a union at UConn had been tried 3 or 4 times before us. Sometimes you have to see how the material conditions are and the university made it easy for us. They took away our healthcare and gave us an awful plan. These workers have families and once they took away our healthcare and raised the student fees — something like 2200 dollars a year, and that’s a lot when you’re making 15–20K — it created a situation where they made it really easy to talk to people and get them riled up.” Manicastri also helped with organizing the Harvard University graduate worker union, which has now been organized for a few years. While they lost the first time they tried as a result of Harvard University’s union busting tactics and lack of support from some graduate workers, the material conditions shifted and helped them to unionize.

Manicastri explains how laws had to shift for graduate students to start organizing: “UAW has the most graduate workers represented across the country. It represents the University of California system, University of Washington, University of Massachusetts, New York University, and many Ivy League schools. The Ivy Leagues started having recent success unionizing because of UAW. Columbia graduate workers organizing with UAW were able to overturn an old NLRB decision and now graduate workers aren’t recognized as just students, but as also workers performing teaching and research for their institutions, and therefore have the right to unionize. During the George W. Bush NLRB, when the Brown University grad workers tried to unionize it was decided that graduate students are considered mentees of their advisors, not workers. The UAW really had their work cut out for them. They took the Columbia case to the NLRB and argued that graduate workers made their university employers millions of dollars per year, and they were able to win that decision. The decision for National Labor Relations Board v. Brown was overturned, and Columbia University then organized. Their victory made it so all the private universities could unionize.” Manicastri and his colleagues’ unionizing efforts are an example of how unions can be formed when workers start having conversations about unfair and unsafe conditions, and how they can strive for better.

Workers employed by various corporations, including Amazon and Starbucks, have also been organizing. Slate reported late last year on the union busting tactics American Corporations have been taking in response to their workers unionizing, including store closings coincidentally just as momentum was gaining for organizing efforts in these locations. Late last year, NPR reported that Starbucks was slowing their workers’ successful union organizing momentum by using extreme union busting practices “from blanketing employee communications with anti-union messaging, including in one-on-one meetings, to announcing raises and benefits for nonunion stores only, to firing workers identified as union leaders.” As of last year, the NLRB was investigating more than 325 unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks. Corporations with a lot of money often will take part in illegal union busting activity because they know that their employees often do not have the resources to fight unlawful termination for unionizing, and they know that if they implement these tactics, they can slow the momentum for union organizing or stop it altogether. Manicastri explains: “It is illegal activity but does the employer have the power to do it? Yes, because they’re a multibillion dollar organization and it’s a drop in the bucket for them.”

These efforts by workers to organize their workplaces are combatted by money and the power that it gives to corporations. Why were the proper safety laws not put into place to ensure that a train derailment would not happen? The railroad companies thought that it would cost them too much money. Why are rail workers not being given the time off that they need to recover from their demanding job conditions? Their employers do not want to spend the money on hiring more workers to help fill in the space when they are on paid sick leave and giving the additional workers who are needed the same benefits. The federal administration cowers to these businesses and lobbyists so that they can make sure that commerce and the economy is not affected while workers suffer. If those who are benefiting most from commerce are not giving back what they owe to the workers, including paid time off and proper benefits, then what is the point? If workers are being used like tools to be thrown away whenever our overlords feel that they are done with us, and all the money being made from the commerce that our government officials claim to want to protect is only being funneled up to the top for corporate greed and an elite group, then why should we care when our legislators lie and pretend that they have our best interests? When the same companies that refuse to give their workers paid time off are not taking a proper response to a major environmental disaster that they caused, we should not expect them to be truthful about their interests. Unsafe labor conditions are creating unsafe conditions for workers, and beyond, and regardless of where you stand with your vote, politicians of both parties need to be held accountable and pressured for safe labor protections for workers. It is a feature of a capitalist society to oppress its workers and it is also at the expense of the rest of society. Corporate greed is prioritized by our legislators, who openly invite societal collapse to preserve their own wealth, titles, and power.

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Follow Steven Manicastri on Twitter: @StevenManicast1.