(morning writing, fascism, climate change crisis)

[elainegrey]

I had my first experience of unexpected ... intrusive?... climate grief yesterday. We crossed the flooding Haw River, and the details of North Carolina's 2024 climate in review and the news that "Unexpectedly, January 2025 was Earth’s hottest January on record " (North Americans can see the lower 48 in a lower than average blue swimming in a sea of higher than average red) came flashing back to me, while i hoped that the rainfall had been slow enough to soak in to abate the drought, and i realized that the high waters testified to the contrary.

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I listened to my representative to the US House have a telephone town hall last night. Couldn't bear to stay for questions because i didn't want to know how long it would take for transgender issues to come up -- or if they did at all. I suppose i should have prepared a question, but i wasn't even sure until we left for the grocery whether i would be listening.

Christine despairs, and at times the small size of the transgender population hits her: are we too few to care about? she asks. Sonia@Dreamwidth quotes Danielle Forémastodon who in listing "Easy and meaningful ways you can protest" includes "Do something gender non-conforming (especially if you’re a cis man)." I think the gender non-conformance is important, because that is the trajectory of control. I noted multiple articles about the consistency of how women in the Trump sphere present themselves in the past year: level of gender conformance is high.  The sense of threat  from all these "protect women" XOs to all women who don't conform chills me.

Back to the town hall, listening to the House Democrats talk about what they have been doing, i note a similarity to what many citizens have been doing: letters, showing up at doors and demanding access. It percolated in my brain overnight, and then i realized there was also the action of bearing witness.

The National Archivist has been fired and that feeds my awareness of the administration's disregard for process that exists for good reason. I note that one of the XOs i have been watching is finally in the National Register (Signed February 5, 2025. Filed 2-10-25; 8:45 am). I think of the value of archives, and shudder at this group of careless oligarchic anarchists dismantling archives while the tech bros scrub the digital record.

Another form of resistance is bearing witness. There's a reason Anne Frank's Diary matters.

I frequently do not journal about politics because my emotions are generally very compartmentalized and with limited journaling time, its more important to anchor the specific to me, the very personal.  The the "clean out" at Google Calendars of observations beyond Federal holidays (while last summer, and not "pre-compliance" with XOs) and the scrubbing of  federal sites' use of language like intersectional and gender makes me think it's a valuable act to record my thoughts.

Yesterday i popped of faxes to Senator Tillis and website comment forms to Senator Budd. This morning i am journaling. Of course my morning todos are getting behind.

I remembered note of a remarkably small number of trans prisoners from electoral-vote.com's daily write up, found the Feb 6 one first, then found the one that struck me on Feb 10.

Feb 6 "Nevertheless, on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-blocks-trump-sending-transgender-women-mens-prisons-2025-02-05/ that the XO was likely unconstitutional. This was the second time a federal judge shot down the XO. It is estimated that about 2,230 transgender inmates are in federal custody. About 1,500 are trans women, most of whom are in men's prisons."

Feb 10 "District Judge Royce Lamberth (a Reagan appointee) concluded that there is no need for immediate transfers until he can hear the case on its merits. There are only 16 male-to-female trans women in the entire federal penal system and he believes they can stay where they are for the time being."

I am presuming these statements can both be correct if the Feb 10 statement is expanded to "...trans women in women's prisons in the entire federal..."

155,115 Total Federal InmatesLast Updated February 6, 2025.