cw: child abuse, sex work, suicide, drugs

Growing up, my family was in a religious cult (a literal cult I am not embellishing at all) and I got abused by members of that group. At a young age it was pretty obvious that something was weird about me (I am trans) and so my family put me through conversion therapy twice (imagine this like a combination between torture and mindfulness training designed to change your gender). That obviously didn’t work, so they threw me out when I was 15 (yes that is illegal but I was a homeless trans teenager who was I supposed to go to for help?).

I dropped out of school and worked on a fishing boat as a cook/deckhand during the fishing season and had to resort to sex work and off/on homelessness in the off season. While homeless, I would often post up in the library to charge me phone or if it was raining. This is where I first read the Manifesto and State and Rev. I also got addicted to heroin and was in and out of jail in that time.

Obviously being at the ass end of a neoliberal capitalist hellscape does things to you. It was pretty easy for me to look around and see that the structures of power were all designed to oppress me. My family had taught me the bullshit line that “hard work” would make me succeed but of course, that’s all bullshit. I watched a lot of my friends die during this time and it cemented in my mind the necessity for change. I saw the politicians and developers working together to destroy my friends’ neighbourhoods.

I eventually got lucky, through a weird ass turn of events I ended up working for a construction company and eventually joined an electrician apprenticeship. Now I’m secure financially and have a good life, but a lot of my friends never made it.

I know nothing about me is better, smarter, “harder working”, or anything else than my friends who didn’t/don’t make it. A combination of the fact that I’m white and just random chance kept me safe through something horrible that kills a lot of people. Most aren’t so lucky.

Realising this, my view has never shifted. I was a Marxist-Leninist reading theory homeless in a library at 17 and I am a Marxist-Leninist today leading a theory group with my friends. Once you have experienced losing everything, you never feel secure again. Even today, I am constantly terrified of losing my job and ending up on the street. A feeling most my coworkers can’t even imagine.

That is why I continue to struggle, organise, educate, and try to help people towards MLism.

I could write an entire other thing on how LA stole all the water from the Owens valley and basically killed an entire agricultural region off. They’re getting ready to do the exact same thing to the San Joaquin valley but I don’t wanna do a writeup in defence of White farmers in the valley given they are basically settlers and to this day they oppress tf out of immigrant labour. A fight between the reactionary city libs and the reactionary (mostly White) rural farm owners is a fight i truly do not give a fuck about. It’s kind of a “play stupid games win stupid prizes” moment

they have such a long history of this. they did this massive to the Black community some decades ago, moving a lot of them up to the desert so they could gentrify neighbourhoods and build more freeways. the defence industry was supposed to provide all these great jobs for everybody in the desert, but they didn’t and basically the high desert region just because even poorer and more disaffected.

they’re doing it again btw. the new mayor has the cops telling unhoused people to move up to the desert and guess what? i have something like 50 solar plants i manage in that area and now all the wire has been stolen from nearly all of them because the cops sent a bunch of unhoused people to camp up there with no resources and they’re desperate.

which is funny lol. we have insurance, i don’t care if they wanna steal our wire, but that being said, it’s extremely dangerous for them to be doing that and I’m really afraid i’m gonna find a dead person who got electrocuted someday

It’s really interesting. I have lived here for a long time, and I have lived in different major cities in the state. I was here in 2020 when we were getting arrested protesting, and I have supported strikes and done other on-the-ground organising with the org i used to be a part of.

I think it’s really important to remember that the vast majority of the people in this city, by population, are struggling working class, non-white people. The people who hold power are viscious liberals who engage in the some of the most naked cutthrought neoliberal politics imaginable, but the people are not. I think that most of the population in the cities is not inherently reactionary. There’s just nobody who has presented them with a coherent left wing project so most of them are just disaffected and not engaged politically.

Among people in my social circle (20-30 year old queer people) the realities of the US’s criminal history aren’t controversial. The problem I run into is more the indoctrination against “authoritarianism” which everybody gets a healthy dose of in school, that being said, if you bring up the Black Panthers, it’s pretty easy to get people on board because everybody respects what that group did.

I guess what I’m saying, is that I feel it’s much easier to organise a large volume of struggling warehouse/service industry workers than it is to organise the rural folks who are still in complete denial about the genocide and imperialism they are directly benefitting from. People in the city benefit from it t0o, but it’s much easier to get them to understand and reckon with that whereas the rural folks seem to be more strongly attached to the myth of personal success and more invested in reaction.

My point is, a united front against fascism could be organised across tendency boundaries in the city. There are people doing this work, but it’s hard and we need more.

yup. it’s really sad, and it’s also terrifying to me as a minority person

edit: i should mention that a LOT of countries sterilise trans people. like, it’s a requirement to transition in a LOT of places

I posted about this on one of my subreddits too. Time to get the ban hammer out for the comment section

i like listening to radio havana at night https://www.radiohc.cu/audio_en_tiempo_real

uwu

uwu i’m still here! i’ve been going through all kinds of shit lately changing jobs and stuff lol. i have neglected my online duties

lmfao iirc those semi-auto bullpup shotguns have mags that fit vials of estradiol i think a 12ga shell and a vial of EV are about the same diameter

uwu

I will share a little bit about myself since it’s relevant. Some of this may be triggering btw.

I knew I was trans when I was about 5 years old. My family was involved in a fundamentalist religious cult and they were (and still are) violently transphobic. I didn’t know what trans even was, I just knew I was a girl. After repeatedly getting caught wearing girl’s clothing my parents sent me to a conversion therapy camp. Think of that as like a torture facility to make you cisgender. After that didn’t work twice, they kicked me out when I was 15. I struggled with homelessness and drugs for years after that doing whatever I had to to get by working on fishing boats and doing sex work.

When I was 22 I decided to repress again. I started preventing as male and using my old name, and got a job that led to a stable career. At that time I decided I would never try transitioning again because it was too dangerous and it would impact my living situation again.

A year ago at 29 I finally felt secure enough to transition. I started hrt, changed my name, all that. Now I’ve been transitioned for a year. I’m at a place in life where my material conditions are pretty good and I’m far happier than I’ve ever been. Many of the people around don’t even know I’m trans or that I was ever a guy lol.

I can’t possibly express how much I never thought I would get to transition. My family never changed, they still hate me but I have a new family of queer comrades and friends I’ve made. Discrimination isn’t as bad as I thought but that’s mostly because many people just don’t know I’m trans (misogyny sucks tho but it’s not as dangerous here as transphobia).

Idk how I ever lived before. My point is that, whatever happens, please know you have friends and support here, and you never know how life may change some day.

My matrix and discord are in my bio if you ever need to talk <3

It’s a good idea. I have a buffer of about 1 year worth of HRT on hand at all times. Supplies longer than 1-2 years start getting tricky cause of expiration dates n shit tho

uwu

oh of course. people say shit like “well those two are practically republicans” as if it’s some excuse for them when really it’s like discipline your party. i don’t care if it’s hard for the voters in west virginia to stomach this shit is actually important, but nah.

nah they just tell us to send money to defeat X republican in Y state meanwhile the democrats spend millions of dollars pushing the absolute most reactionary shit there is to shift the window so far right that they can continue doing nothing and calling it progress meanwhile my comrades are dying

lo siento. it’s fucking terrifying

correct. it is split 50/50 however the dems also hold the presidency so the VP could break a senate tie making it 51/50. there’s nothing stopping them from doing that other than that they don’t give a fuck

ya that’s definitely valid and i usually do the same thing on a local level. i just don’t think it’s good for “revolutionary” orgs to make it their messaging to vote for dems

idfk i usually do one of a few things

sometimes i write in Juan Guiado (if the US loves him so much, then they can elect him)

sometimes i write in a nice encouraging note to the ballot counter (“you are a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day” this does two things, it’s super annoying cause it has to be manually reviewed, and also maybe some random person will smile)

sometimes when it’s like a local election there’s actually a tiny bit of incremental good that can happen so i vote for those sometimes like in a school board situation where there’s someone who will do a better free lunch program or something small like that

hoenstly this year i just threw the entire ballot in the trash. i’m too discouraged to even go through it

tbh the true value of 20 yards of linen is only realised when it’s made into thigh highs

one day soon we shall all have unlimited thigh highs

soon comrade, soon

nevermind my experience as a trans women working in heavy industry that has shown me that most of the proletariat is basically just fine with trans people

omg same lol

yay!!! uwu

hell yes!! that’s so great. it made me so happy when I got mine.

(I even sent a photo of mine to transphobic family members to spite them uwu)

epically based. I need one too. the need for snuggles is immense this time of year!!

alright, here is what I will do. for the time being, I will make the archive available in an sqlite format. it will have text and comments + URLs for videos and images

in a second archive I will include images by submission I’d

in a third archive I will place videos

I should have time to get it together and up on my site during the last week of this month>

probably going to do the lemmy archive community idea. i could provide it as a download, but it would be massive lol, it’s a lot of content.

ya it would but i’m a terrible web admin so we’ll see if it happens lol

of course!

epically based! yes indeed

lol sorry about that. i just realised this.

it’s easier to reach me on matrix btw @ashley:genzedong.org

I used to but I stopped hosting it because it was clunky (i wrote it in PHP lmfao)

I think a lemmy instance would be much nicer looking. I think either a GZD archive community here or a dedicated archive instance that is federated would be nice.

it does and federation is working

i wonder how long before some redditors start fucking with it

ya, i’ve thought about doing that but it kind of defeats the point of using matrix. im still undecided on it

yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

tysm to u/Ancient_Might_5820 for suggesting the picture!!!

agree. this reads like something our extended family would send us

lmfao what the fuck lol

absolute uncritical support