As part of the trans community in Canada it’s devastating watching our American kinfolk suffer. Because of the Safe Third Country Agreement American citizens cannot claim refugee status here. I have been writing to every politician I can to try and punch out an exception. The minute I can I am opening up my home to as many folk as I can.

I feel validated in an opinion I have had for ages : that in all the talk about 2nd Amendment rights Americans do guns are nothing but a security blanket they clutch to make them feel like Democracy will be saved or be maintained as long as they clutch their emotional support weapon. They will watch rights be stripped from them, their neighbours carted off in wagons and none of them will shoot even if they have the weapon on their person while this is happening. They will protest, they will write and verbalize their dissent and they will appeal to authority and band together democratically but the ownership of the weapons themselves are useless. Realistically if someone from the government comes for them they will likely go quietly because no one is coming to save them. At that point it’s basically over. The system is too big to fight.

The real resistance is in numbers not armaments. It doesn’t matter what you are wielding if you have solidarity and organization and the bravery to misbehave. Resistance can be in attacking the gears that make things run by not doing your job or doing it poorly. Refusing to comply in a multitude of ways like sending things to the wrong place or making ‘mistakes’ that cost time and effort to fix. A government can only force compliance so much and at the end of the day runs on good faith. Guns are a distraction to jingle in your face so you stay isolated. Building walls between you and other humans with dreams you will defend your own little fort against the tides of tyranny.

And transgender ideology? What is that? To be nice to transgender people?

If I were to frame it in terms of an ideology - that we should be allowed to pursue happiness and comfort aided by the backing of scientific evidence to ensure we are safe. That our lives not be rendered into terms where reproductive function or lack thereof dictates how we must live our lives.

And that while we do not demand full metaphysical submission of belief of other people that we are our gender it should be acknowledged that our social engineering mechanisms are a kindness that allow us greater room to psychologicaly function. These absences of accommodation in professional situations or public design causes either our livelihoods or accessibility to spaces or facets of society to become hardships above and beyond the average citizen.

I personally do not care if someone is “nice” to me or not. I care about being able to leave their vacinity if they are being an ass and that my safety and job security isn’t effected by me being trans.

Oh Gods I hope this isn’t the case. The right would start foaming at the mouth and could start rounding us up as threats.

It’s also… a little ghoulish to speak about a kid losing their parent that way. Whatever you think of the man his kid’s grief isn’t exactly something to celebrate. I get not mourning the man but celebrating his death isn’t going to help us trans folks in the end. I have a feeling that this is going to get a whole lot worse for all of us as a people very quickly and as a whole we’re already a group hanging on by our fingertips.

This is career advice, not anti-intellectualism. With the rising cost of schools that leave so many in debt bondage University has risks. If you pick a field of study that you find rewarding but the jobs associated crush your soul or if there is no job then you end up in fantastic amounts of debt that unlike other debt cannot be forgiven. A lot of education via a university route is padded or inflated with requirements for the degree that do not add to one’s meaningful body of knowledge but exist to line the pockets of the institutions.

None of this is to say that one shouldn’t pursue knowledge, university is not the only route toward intellectualism. Being in trades does not stop one from learning from other resources. Autodiadactism is on the rise. What people are against is a predatory system of for profit post secondary education.

Misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of bigotry are also not inherent in blue collar positions by default. It more depends on your geographical location and crew in either situation because the more culturally normal it is in a given city to be queer or how many women are hired in a work place change those workplaces. As a trans person I have worked a number of blue collar jobs that compared to trans friends of mine in whitecollar positions have been more universally accepting of my identity. A number of my co-workers in those construction jobs are also damn near always in classes of some variety, sometimes in accredited institutions but not always. We are all in situations where the job market and personal survival pushes us to the practicality of going where the money is for work but not allowing ourselves to be entirely defined by our jobs. Sometimes the blue collar positions are very meaningful. They are often tied in to incredibly basic facets of quality of life, helping people be properly sheltered, hygenic and comfortable or improving communities through infrastructure.

Your post in some ways comes across as a bit elitist as though white collar positions demanding high levels of acreditied education are more valid than blue collar ones. We should be looking to support blue collar positions as not failure states and provide safety nets for the physical strain of those positions while offering workers chances to obtain education for education sake at reasonable cost to allow them career flexibility and personal enrichment while critiquing systems that place so great a financial burden on students.