hello yes attention please
(I actually hate the term “housekeeping” for informative administrative conversations or announcements, please tell me what terms you like to use as alternatives?)
First off: today is Transgender Day of Remembrance and this week is Transgender Awareness Week. Today is to observe and mourn the lives of those trans siblings killed this year—the general estimate right now is at least 37 lives lost to anti-transgender focused violence. I’m lighting a candle in their honor.
Secondly, as the timing seems fitting, I’m switching over my pronouns in bios to they/them. I’m nonbinary transgender, a femme queer specifically, and my pronouns are either they/them or she/her. I’m flexible IRL but it’s easier to have one option consistently used in bios and this is the one I’m going to roll with. This is not new-news per se, but if you didn’t know already, now you do!
THIRDLY and finally: I’ve started writing a weekly column for the local Virginia news outlet The Dogwood. My first piece is about why I’m cancelling Thanksgiving. Here’s a snippet:
We’re coming up on another major holiday, one whose iconography is deeply rooted in the myth of individual survival through both communal interdependence and exploitation of vulnerable outside communities. Thanksgiving is a celebration of hardiness, survival, generosity, we tell ourselves. It’s also the demarcation of the Pilgrims’ main moment of pretending to give back to the Wampanoag people, rather than living with abject disregard for the reality of coexisting together on shared land and the obligations to each other that brings. They lived in a society and their actions impacted each other–the Wampanoag sharing their corn allowed the Pilgrims to plant and harvest stores for the winter. The Pilgrims’ European illnesses, in turn, devastated the Wampanoag community.
Thanksgiving, in theory, is an observance of the fact that we live in a society and need to consider each other’s wellbeing in order to survive and even thrive. None of us can observe Thanksgiving as an isolated being–we are interdependent and this is what is being recognized when we come together and offer gratitude to each other for another year in community.
I’ll be writing about queer issues, marijuana legislation in Virginia, and mental health *stuff.* Please go read, and send me tips about things going on locally that you think I should be aware of as I write each week!
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If you love my writing and want to buy me a coffee or some whiskey, my Venmo is @haettinger.
Stay safe and warm.
xo,
Eve