By Heather McNamara
Since life in the United States under this new reality show star regime has transformed our already pitifully short 48-hour news cycle into more of a 48-minute news cycle, I thought I would start a monthly roundup of news stories that affect transgender people and cis women.
To be clear, a lot happened in the world of race politics, flooding, nuclear war, and sundry types of doom but I’m going to focus this news roundup on gender and on the accomplishments of trans people and cis women.
Friday, August 4th
Some jerk software engineer at Google writes a memo about how actually men are just better at tech and actually he’s so sick of women and their SJW crap or some nonsense. All women everywhere suppress the urge to vomit.
“Uber’s search for a female CEO narrowed down to 3 men” – Title speaks for its god damned self.
Monday, August 7th
Google memo author is fired! Yay! Manbabies everywhere whine into the void.
Wednesday, August 9th
Little Miss Flint, Mari Copeny, hit a fundraising goal of $10,000 for the pack your back challenge to get school supplies for all the Flint children in need. Because she’s awesome and she can do anything and we love her.
Saturday, August 12th
Heather Heyer is killed while protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Sunday, August 13th
Ivanka wakes up after Shabbat and finds out her dad was totes cool with the Nazis who shouted “Jews will not replace us” and then killed Heather Heyer. She tweets a strongly worded condemnation of white supremacy then goes right back to supporting her white supremacist father.
Wednesday, August 16th
Susan Bro, Heather Heyer’s mother, gives powerful eulogy in which she promises that Heather’s legacy will be one of fighting for justice:
“They tried to kill my child to shut her up, but guess what, you just magnified her,” … “I’d rather have my child, but by golly if I got to give her up, we’re going to make it count.”
News is released that Holly Boswell, a transgender advocate and artist who designed the now widely known and used transgender symbol, has died. She was 66 years old.
Thursday, August 17th
Malala Yousafzai, Nobel Prize winner and champion of education for women and girls, announces she’s finished her A-levels and will be going to Oxford. Yay, Malala!
Monday, August 21st
[World] Chile legalizes abortion, starts looking better and better every day for those of us eager to gtfo here.
Tuesday, August 22nd
Trump directs Pentagon to ban recruiting openly trans people and not provide transition treatment.
Hillary Clinton releases an excerpt of her upcoming book What Happened, in which she discusses how she’d have liked to tell Trump “back off, creep” during the debate in which he shadowed and snarled at her the entire time. Us too, Hillary. Us. Too.
Friday, August 25th
Trump declares August 26th to be “Women’s Equality Day” because it is the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment. We all wait for the other shoe to drop.
Saturday, August 26th
Police respond to domestic violence report and kill a transgender woman named Kiwi Herring. Local residents find the police report to be suspicious. The report also misgenders Kiwi.
Monday August 28th
Trump thought two blonde women were the same person because he’s a donkey’s butt.
A protest breaks out in St. Louis Missouri after Kiwi Herring, a black transgender woman, is killed by police responding to a stabbing. A car plows through the protesters, hitting three.
Tuesday, August 29th
Defense secretary Jim Mattis responds to Trump’s directives by insisting upon a panel to discuss how best to follow Trump’s orders. This is widely regarded as a passive-aggressive refusal to follow Trump’s ridiculous orders, but legal experts caution against this overly charitable interpretation.
Jamie Kirchick writes a shitty horrible New York Times op-ed wherein he claims that Chelsea Manning is beloved by the left for being transgender (we WISH it were that easy!) in spite of setting LGBT rights back decades by being a trans person who didn’t follow orders or some such nonsense. This really couldn’t have come at a worse time. Thanks a lot, Kirchick.
Thursday, August 31st
Lawsuits are filed by GLAD, ACLU, Lesbian and something or other league and basically the entire alphabet of LGBTQIA organizations against the transgender ban
Trump shows his commitment to women’s equality by cancelling Obama’s initiatives to promote women’s equality. Ivanka Trump proves herself exactly as useless as we all knew she was when she supports her father’s rollback on wage equality data collection. This is 180 degrees from her stated goals of working toward equal pay but she’s a jackass and you should already know that by now.
Kamala Harris adds her support to Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill. This bill is unlikely to gain any traction in a heavily Republican congress, but even so it is concerning that reproductive rights are conspicuously absent from the bill. ■
