Overview:
The Lemmy place to discuss the news and experiences of transgender people.
Rules:
Keep discussions civil.
Arguments against transgender rights will be removed.
No bigotry is allowed - including transphobia, homophobia, speciesism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, castism, or xenophobia.
Shinigami Eyes:
Extension for Quickly Spotting Transphobes Online.
spoiler iphone: unofficial workaround to use extension Install the Orion browser for ios to use the firefox extension. :::
Related:
!lgbtq_plus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Friendly reminder that if you're trans and planning on leaving the states (and you really should be), you'll need to leave by land or an airport that doesn't have body scanners. As you will be detained if what they see in the scanner doesn't match their expectations based on your passport.
You guys are way too precious about your public toilets.
Sometimes the arrest is the protest.
Don't get yourself vcoded out of protest please
They're doing state mandated conversion therapies in the prisons.
Just take a shit in the hall next time. They pardon people for that.
Peacefully disobeying the law is not a good idea under fascism. This was a brave, albeit really stupid, thing to do. I hope this woman makes it out okay.
No kidding. Prison is not a good place to be trans at the best of times. She seems to be aware of this but... I dunno. As a protest goes this seems ill advised. She might be playing Joan of Arc here but I just hope she doesn't regret this later.
as stupid as a trans woman entering the men's bathroom and being ridiculed/assaulted? there's really no winning for trans people
With RepubliKKKans, the cruelty is the point. The governor of Texas signed a bill a couple years ago that made it so that, iirc, construction workers were no longer required by law to be given water breaks. There are 60 days in Dallas, TX per year with an average high temperature at least 97 degrees Fahrenheit. I remember one stretch about 20 years ago in Austin where the temperature was 100+ for 30 days in a row.
She didn't do anything wrong; but regardless, if you're going to scale the wall to go into the lion's den at the zoo definitely don't announce it to them via megaphone first.
Relevant facts:
source: Tampa Bay Times (archive.ph link)
Idiot: ✓
Identifies as moderate conservative, but is mostly apolitical: ✓
What a surprise.
I.... Am I the only one that is shocked by the fact that there are cops posted at BATHROOM??????? The fuck??? (Also wtf do they have a law that say you can do prison if you step in the wrong bathroom????)
The cops were only there because she sent the letter telling them when and where she would be doing this. Also a 60 day sentence would not be served in prison, but the county jail (they are different).
60 days in a Florida county jail is probably the worse fate.
If someone sent me a letter saying they were going to use a bathroom I would ignore it, not send cops there. Your sentence is phrased like they simply had to be there which is just validating, if inadvertently, the idea that going to the fucking washroom should be a crime. I do agree that prison vs jail is probably something we should be more careful with but the fact remains that she never should encountered any resistance at all, period.
She explicitly said in the letter that she was going to break the law. Here is one of the letters she wrote:
I understand that if you're receiving this letter, you're part of the Florida Bicameral Legislature, which means you're probably one of the people who wrote this law or voted for it. I know that you know in your heart that this law is wrong and unjust. I know that you know in your heart that it's wrong to arrest me and jail me for sixty days for simply using the bathroom. I know that you know in your heart that transgender people are human too, and that you can't arrest us away. I know that you know in your heart that transgender people are no different from you or anybody else. I know that you know in your heart that the same people that go to church with you, eat in the same restaurants, go to the same schools, root for the same sports teams, watch the same movies and pray to the same God as you cannot be all bad. I know that you know that I have dignity. That's why I know that you won't arrest me.
She made an emotional appeal to the Florida legislature and hoped they wouldn't arrest her in an act of civil disobedience. Instead, they sent police to dissuade her from violating the law, and then had her arrested when she broke the law anyway.
If someone sent me a letter saying they were going to use a bathroom I would ignore it, not send cops there.
I guess you're not a Florida legislator, huh? She didn't send the letter to the reasonable, average person - she sent them to the people who voted in the law that bans trans people from using public restrooms. What is relevant here is what the people who did receive the letter would likely do in response?
Your sentence is phrased like they simply had to be there which is just validating, if inadvertently, the idea that going to the fucking washroom should be a crime
void_turtle's phrasing is accurate, the cops were only posted at that particular bathroom at that particular time because she gave advanced warning she was going to be there, they absolutely weren't going to let a trans woman flagrantly violate the law they passed (even if that means enforcing a ridiculous and immoral law - the fact they passed the law is a reason to think they wouldn't mind enforcing that law too).
void_turtle isn't implying this was the right thing for the Florida lawmakers to do, only that it is a reasonable outcome to expect from sending the letter.
she never should encountered any resistance at all, period.
She looks cis passing to me and probably wouldn't have encountered resistance if she hadn't intentionally notified the lawmakers of her intent to violate their law at a particular time and place. That's what got her arrested.
That said, many trans people don't have the passing privilege she has, and the law most impacts those people who anyone would spot as visibly trans, and thus would be at most risk of arrest. Marcy Rheintgen is engaging in civil disobedience she likely wouldn't otherwise be subject to, and it would make a better story of self sacrifice if she wasn't an ignorant reactionary who admitted she didn't actually think she would be arrested and now regrets doing it, lol.
You wtote so much and yet somehow deftly missed the entire point by a good half-mile so all I have for you is:
“Ok.”
haha, that sounds like me - sorry for the essay 🙈
It’s ok to get lost in the weeds.
The point is that the VoidTurtle had no reason to say what they did, nor in the way they said it, except to try to remind us that “actually she broke the law so gotcha!”. This is true, but the law here is complete, hateful nonsense designed to validate the mistreatment and erasure of trans people and does not help protect anyone from anything. The state sent cops there to arrest her for washing her hands. It doesn’t help that cops have a history of not taking actual crimes seriously enough so that doesn’t help their case knowing that they seemed to have had no issue finding people to go do this job.
The underlying lesson is that if someone does something awful because some fucked up law permits them to do it then they still did that terrible thing and should be called out for it anyway. It was once perfectly legal to treat black people like less than full human beings but enough people said “no” while it was legal to get that changed. Imagine if someone was talking about how they helped lynch an escaped slave and when you challenged them on that VoidTurtle walked in like “actually that’s legal maybe the slave shouldn’t have tried to escape if they didn’t want to get killed.”
Legality does not equal morality, it simply often coincides with it and many times does not.
I hope that clears things up.
oh, no - I understood your position then
I think you're wrong that void_turtle, whose account has black flag waving and who makes comments defending leftist activists and is clearly anti-police, is taking the position that the law is morality and that she deserves to be arrested ... there are context clues, and I'm not sure why you don't see them but your response to void_turtle seems unreasonable to me.
Rereading void_turtle's comment:
The cops were only there because she sent the letter telling them when and where she would be doing this. Also a 60 day sentence would not be served in prison, but the county jail (they are different).
This response does not read to me as a defense of her arrest, but an explanation as to why she was even arrested in the first place. It's a clarification, not a condemnation of her or a "gotcha" to justify her arrest. I don't see how you could read it that way, to be honest.
Anyway, if I'm not mistaken, we're all on the same page here, we all agree: fuck this law, fuck the cops, and this arrest is immoral.
Nobody here is arguing the law is moral or that breaking the law morally justifies arrest.
Because we know why she was arrested, it’s in the article. And frankly, even though she failed to understand it herself, I understand why making one’s civil disobedience known can be important. The question was about why cops were posted outside the bathroom and phrased with clear exasperation at how we’ve gotten to the point where we take the threat of handwashing so seriously.
What does VoidTurtle’s comment actually add to the conversation? I know what they said but I’d like to know why they felt the need to say it, and why they said it so coldly.
This was your comment:
I… Am I the only one that is shocked by the fact that there are cops posted at BATHROOM??? The fuck??? (Also wtf do they have a law that say you can do prison if you step in the wrong bathroom???)
This was void_turtle's response:
The cops were only there because she sent the letter telling them when and where she would be doing this. Also a 60 day sentence would not be served in prison, but the county jail (they are different).
Here's how I interpret this:
I do not experience void_turtle's comment as cold or as inappropriate, they aren't responding to your moral outrage, they are clarifying a fact and potential misunderstanding.
I also thought your original comment was confusion about why cops were posted, not just moral outrage that cops were posted in response to the letter.
void_turtle and I both seem to have interpreted your comment as being ignorant to the relevant facts, that she told anti-trans lawmakers where she was going to violate one of their anti-trans laws, which explains why the cops were posted there.
The response was nothing more than clarification, I really don't interpret their comment as coldly dismissing your moral outrage, truly as only clarifying something they thought you didn't know. We thought you hadn't read the article, we thought your response indicated you didn't know why the cops were posted to arrest her. (The article made it clear: the cops were posted because the anti-trans lawmakers asked them to arrest her if she broke the law she declared she would violate.)
Your moral outrage is justified (I'm with you - it's insane), but I can't tell if you are genuinely confused as to why anti-trans lawmakers would do something as immoral as assign cops to guard a bathroom and enforce a bathroom bill they passed?
It's still fucking absurd.
It is Florida. Nothing shocks me coming from there.
Police were there because she sent letters in advance telling them when and where she would use the restroom in violation of the law. Otherwise not only would police not have been guarding that particular bathroom, but she would have likely passed as a cis woman and used the restroom without incident.
I mean she thought of politics as something philosophical that doesn't actually effect people so I'm not sure how someone this sheltered exists while also being trans. But it's fascinating in a horrifyingly stupid way. It explains why she really thought they wouldn't actually arrest her.
She's actually not mentally prepared to do prison time so I hope they figure something out.
Florida ignoring her legal name change is goofy though.
Probably why some are non voters to, they don't think actually affects them.
It's beyond stupid though, laws actually exist and we live in functioning society because of them (lol). Laws are created through politics. This isn't a hard concept to grasp, does she think if she speeds she'll never get a ticket? That it's just in movies?
Very strange, scary honestly
Some people really do just don't think about it much. There's also plenty examples of stuff like "we can't legalize weed, it's illegal drugs!" and then completely missing the contradiction
I don't really know how they think the world works, like they think that laws are just part of the natural order or things? And so politics barely mean anything? Or is just symbolic? I dunno
Some people do think that the society we exist in is just part of the natural order and that it's vain to try to change it or even care about it. I had an ex that was like that: whenever I tried talking about politics with her she would just go "What's the point of talking about it, we can't change anything anyway"
It's really weird honestly, considering that, you know, literally all of society is built up by humans
Have they just never read any history at all?
I think some people feel like history is in the past, and if they weren't there to see it? Well it's no different than a fairy tale.
I guess people heard people say that we have "reached the end of history", and accepted it without question
Seems like history is very much still alive and well
She’s a devout Catholic who describes herself as a political centrist, with an appreciation for “family values”
😬
She's a brainwashed victim of groomers and control systems. aka, organized religion
Placing cops in front of a bathroom just because a trans woman said she would go wash her hands there should sound crazy to anyone. It's sad that it's apparently just normal now
So the thing to do now is to announce where you're going to wash your hands to the police and then just not show up.
Unironically yes, waste their resources on this
And you know those cops fucking relished it
Putting people into jail for using a supposed wrong bathroom to wash hands is just ridiculous even without considering anything transgender.
I would never be a cop, but even as a pig, I can't imagine getting that assignment and not asking if that was really what the community needed from me that day. And a whole fucking group for one 20yo washing her hands? How embarrassing for them.
The Nazis didn't have a vast historical record that illustrates the dangers of dehumanizing and imprisoning groups of peoples, and violently smashing protests for fascism; what excuse do these American cops and ICE agents have? I have to conclude that those who participate want this.
Should we be held to higher ethical standards than the Germans of the past? We have a greater awareness of past atrocities and a deeper understanding of their consequences, and contemporary societies are expected to adhere to more stringent ethical guidelines and uphold human rights
All I can say about this is that it's a courageous act.
I genuinely don't know whether it was well considered.
I hope she's able to inspire others to fight unjust treatment of others. This feels like an extreme act of courage from someone with a lot to lose, and she is not just a brave woman, but this should be seen as an admirable action by anyone, no matter who they are or what they believe, because it's a level of sacrifice that most of us would never be able to take on.
As many people as we have on near every post here these days talking about why no one is taking any action, they're still safe behind their screen while this lady marched, announced, right through the front gate of the enemy's house. People like Marcy are who have gotten us to this point of the rights we have, not the critics, no matter how vocal they get.
Why is any business still in Florida?
There won't be once the ocean reclaims Florida