Yes We Can

Saturday, I met up in the park to canvass 25 Murray homes for Rosalba Dominguez and Natalie Pinkney, who are running for the Utah Legislature and the Salt Lake County Council, respectfully. Most of the voters are undecided in both races, with one strong supporter among the few who answered for Natalie. One voter is already supporting Rosalba’s opponent, but he promised to look over Natalie’s literature.

Saturday afternoon, a friend and I drove up to Causey Reservoir to do some kayaking. It’s an incredibly beautiful and scenic area. We were in the water for an hour and 35 minutes, and we traveled about 3 nautical miles on our round trip. One girl fell off her paddle board and we stayed nearby in case she needed assistance while she climbed back onboard.

Sunday I was so exhausted I needed a good extra couple of hours nap to restore my energy levels. The soak in the bathtub the night before was a blessing to my stiff thighs, core, and shoulders—not to mention my aching feet. The water socks were not enough to handle the rocky terrain, so I ordered a pair of water shoes. My new lightweight sit-inside kayak has arrived, and I can’t wait to take it out for a spin, probably the weekend after next.

As a project of the Utah Coalition to Protect Transgender Rights, I set up the Utah Transgender Rights Advocacy Network (UTRAN). This consists of an email distribution list and a discord server that can be used by everyone in the coalition to share information and action items. The coalition is open to include anyone who wants to join that is not detrimental to the cause. We also plan to continue to hold monthly meetings of the coalition which will be weekly during the legislative session.

One of the channels I included on the discord server is one that includes books or media that portray transgender characters as fully human. It's a place where people can share recommendations about books they read, shows they watched, and series that they watch that provide an inspiration for our trans community.

Discord also allows us to schedule events and meetups, a feature I hope we start using.

I created a few more channels based on a document generated by ChatGPT on ideas on how to help influence legislators to become effective transgender rights champions. We already have stalwart defenders in the minority party and a super minority in the majority party. We need them to go further. We could use some champions.

Areas that ChatGPT suggested are:

1. Building Alliances and Partnerships

2. Educating and Informing

3. Personalizing the Message

4. Engaging in Grassroots Advocacy

5. Addressing Concerns and Counter Arguments

6. Leveraging Media and Public Opinion

7. Engaging Directly with Legislators

8. Being Persistent and Patient

As you can see, the list is long. We are already doing some of these things, but this AI-generated document allows us to think strategically on how to make that happen. We are focusing on the first three areas this year, and I created discord channels for those areas.

Other potential ideas include providing social media toolkits and a social media campaign based on stories of trans joy and trans success.

One of the issues I have been researching is access to trans healthcare. If you are denied access to medically necessary trans healthcare, Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE) is a potentially great resource. A4TE is the newly merged organization of NCTE (National Center for Transgender Education) and TLDEF (Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund). They might be willing to take up your case. Their website is https://transequality.org/. Also on the website is a know-your-rights resource: https://transequality.org/resources/know-your-rights-healthcare. If they aren’t able to help you, and especially if the provider is a government entity, you can reach out to the ACLU of Utah via their intake form: https://www.acluutah.org/en/request-help. If the defendant is not a governmental entity, they will probably not take your case, but may be able to refer you to a partner organization who would.

Monday, I filed my candidacy for the Second Vice Chair of the Salt Lake County Democratic Party. The election is in October. This is going to be a short campaign, and one I look forward to. The Second Vice Chair works closely with the fourteen issues and identities caucuses.

Tuesday, I attended a watch party for the Presidential Debate at the Green Pig Pub and Grill. I think Kamala Harris nailed it. She laid out her economic and national security plans, while pointing out why Donald Trump should not be elected to a second term. Trump got so flustered that he spouted that Kamala “wants to give transgender operations to illegals in prison”, not to mention some trope about immigrants eating pets in Springfield. He also hemmed on the reproductive care issue, and would not commit to veto a national abortion ban. His speech was so full of vitriol and lies, it was almost sickening to watch. I appreciated the hosts calling him on some of the blatant lies.

Harris, on the other hand, proposed an economic plan that will lift up working families and help get them into homes. She also demonstrated that she is a proponent of bodily autonomy and committed to veto a national ban on abortion and sign into a law enshrining Roe v Wade. She presented multiple cases where the overturning of Roe v Wade has harmed women, and how much more damage Project 2025 will cause.

Pundits are still talking about how Kamala Harris dominated the presidential debate. Wisconsin and North Carolina look to be moving in her favor. Harris is using the snippet of the debate related to reproductive care access as a political advertisement. 64 percent of people polled feel that she was the clear winner, while 36 percent feel it was Donald Trump. All I can say is that a lot of those people must have significant cognizant bias. Overcoming that hurdle may be tough, but it needs to be done for democracy’s sake.

The more I learn about Kamala Harris and the more I watch her in action, the more impressed I am with her. The opposite can certainly be said for me about Donald Trump. All the things he has done and the way he behaves, with his egotistical contempt for people just makes me want to disassociate myself further and further from him.

Wednesday was the twenty-third anniversary of 9/11. I remember watching the footage as first one, and then two aircraft flew into the world trade centers, the horror as people on the upper stories leaped to their deaths, while people on the lower stories evacuated the building with the help of emergency response teams. On the ground, people were fleeing the scene as the towers ultimately collapsed, covering them in white dust and grey ashes. Then another plane crashed into the pentagon, and another crashed after passengers overwhelmed the hijackers. The loss of life that day was horrific—over 3,000 people killed, including members of the emergency response teams who had worked tirelessly to help get them out. I remember thinking as I rode the train back home from the twenty-three story Cityplace Building in Dallas where I worked that this was very clearly an act of war.

There were some people who claimed that there had to be a conspiracy because there was no way that the jet fuel by itself would be enough to bring the buildings down. Civil engineers and material scientists would disagree. If the steel supports get hot enough, they lose their rigidity, and can began to buckle. With enough weight above them, the lack of vertical support would cascade, bringing the whole building down—which is what we witnessed. Don’t forget that Osama bin Laden, who claimed responsibility, had an education in civil engineering, and could have easily taken that into consideration. Regardless, there is no support for a larger conspiracy, and it would not bring back the lives lost. So this time of year we honor those we lost, and those who came together to rebuild after the disaster.

In Mistress of Lies, by K. M. Enright, Samuel wishes he would have accepted Shan’s invitation to watch the royal unveiling from the balconies above. Despite dressing like the ruling class, and sharing their blood and money, they haven’t made a Blood Worker out of him yet. To Samuel it feels like time has come full circle and it’s the Spring Equinox again, when a victim was offered up as a blood sacrifice to the Eternal King.

In More Stars than Grains of Sand, Al Forsyth posits that by simple math each person has one million trillion ancestors. From the time of Shakespeare, each of us would have no fewer that 16,384 ancestors exchanging genetic material. However, one million trillion is many more times than the number of people who have actually ever lived. While there were that many couplings, many of them would have to been couplings of people with shared ancestry. Especially in small settler populations, it was not uncommon for cousins to be mated and produce offspring until laws started springing up forbidding it. So our family trees, by necessity, must have intertwined quite frequently.

In The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, by Becky Chambers, Sissix punches commands into the docking hatch controls to run a decontamination scan, because Lovey, the AI that always did that has suffered damage from an attack and is now unable to automate those scans. Because she’s unable to leave the core, Kizzy had requested an alternate source of assistance. Watching her friend Pepper’s shuttle clank into place, Sissix notes that she would be dying to take it for a spin under any other circumstances--ie, if Lovey weren’t currently undergoing a cascade failure.

In The Phoenix Keeper, by Sarah A MacLean, Aila skirts visitors by taking curving routes. Her inability to talk to people is proving to be a barrier to her reviving the phoenix program. As she arrives at her destination, she encounters a crowd gasping at the exhibit viewing window.

One of the animals that Aila tends is an archibird. Attracted to metal, the saliva of these birds instantaneously welds any two pieces of metal together.

Aila and Tanya have long since given up on repairing the constantly rupturing pipes of the water spigot in the phoenix area. However, the "needing to do the chore" makes a handy excuse as a useful code phrase to make it easier to flee human interactions.

In the poem “Inheritance”, by W. S Merwin, published in his collection The Shadow of Sirius, Merwin reflects on a dictionary he inherited from his father who died 30 years prior. It was a book he was forbidden to touch as a child, because the pages were so delicate. Yet, it became something he treasured, flipping through the pages looking for meaning.

It is so tempting in these times to try to avoid social contacts, to just find our relative corners and want to wait things out until they become better. But they won't get better if we don't recognize our connections, work through the discomfort and build the bridges. We have worked so hard to get to where we are, that it can be incredibly frustrating to watch as what we built collapses in front of our eyes. No matter how uncomfortable it may seem, we need to reach out, work together, demanding transparency and honesty, calling out those who are or would be the masters of lies.

But at the same time, we need to make space, to rest, to recharge, to draw new inspiration, and then get right back out there to defend our rights, our lives, and our democracy.