"free and open and lazy"

Hello,

I'm trying something new and routine: seven things on my mind as the week winds down.

Friday Seven // 002

// 1. Well, fuck. It's Saturday, it's time to wake up, I'm a little late sending this because my end-of-day hours were spent recording an episode of Death Panel that will be up this coming week. I joined hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson to talk about the multiple anti-trans executive orders issued by Trump over these first two weeks.

So far, I've written about two of them:

• First, the broad "gender ideology" ban, that has resulted already in some trans women in federal prison being moved to men's facilities. As of posting this, a lawsuit has temporarily blocked implementation of this part of the executive order while it is fought out in court. This order has also resulted in trans people being blocked from updating their passports, with some people reporting their current passports were withheld when they tried to update them.
• I also wrote about the revived and much more ideological military ban. Similarly, a lawsuit has been brought to challenge this part of the executive order, but we are still waiting on the court to rule on whether the law will be temporarily blocked as the case plays out.

There is an appalling silence from the media outlets who helped usher these executive orders along, and who typically love to take claim for their organizations' "impact." May their leadership know not one moment of peace. There is also some outstanding reporting, mostly produced by trans and nonbinary journalists—who, unlike the vast majority of people in US newsrooms who are purportedly covering this story, are also living and working through this.

For breaking news: Lil Kalish at HuffPo; Lex McMenamin at Teen Vogue; Orion Rummler and Kate Sosin at The 19th; and Jo Yurcaba at NBC News. Adam Rhodes at The Appeal and Beth Schwartzapfel at The Marshall Project have done excellent work focused on conditions for trans and nonbinary people who are incarcerated. And for breaking legal news, Chris Geidner is getting both analysis and court filings out there, fast. There's also excellent political commentators, such as Katelyn Burns (whose feature stories are also essential) and Parker Molloy, who have been working on this beat for years. There's a wave of activists and influencers producing independent content responding to the news, as well. There are people I read that I know I have overlooked in my haste right now. Forgive me. Informed news as it breaks is what I have tried to highlight. Please consider joining me in making a monthly donation to the Trans Journalists Association and the Prison Journalism Project.

// 2. Reading and to-read this weekend: the new segregationists; the imperial boomerang; the Fourteenth Amendment; "the people taking over the country currently have spent the last decade, in public, I might add, crafting a playbook—one you dismissed—that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America. And that includes our free and open and lazy mainstream media." Not unrelated: the problem with metadata. And I also wrote about living through the destructive power of the unremarkable clowns now in charge.

// 3. "How do you do, fellow LGB sodomites?" Also: class solidarity, Mothra, and "people who have a favorite CDC dataset." (You may find all that and more saved by the Internet Archive.)

// 4. Honestly, coffee, and not in an "every day give yourself a little treat" sense, but in a "so long as I have ten minutes to do nothing else but make this French press, that feels more normal" sense. (This is what I've been drinking for a few months.)

// 5. "from Nineveh," by Maria Galina, translated by Ainsley Morse, published in The New York Review of Books, February 13, 2025.

// 6. Second seed catalogue of the season just got here. Let's look at some wildflowers.

// 7. Sojourners for Justice Press has a very good 2025 calendar still available, with "on this day..." observations alongside archival images from radical Black women's history. It was designed by Cindy Lau and Neta Bomani. Sales support SJP, an independent press.

Thanks for reading. You are still here.