alexandra's pile of notes

Enough scapegoating of trans women by politicians who refuse to confront male violence. Enough media sensationalism that profits from hatred while women of all backgrounds suffer real harm. Enough false feminism that abandons the most vulnerable women leaving all women at greater risk. Enough of those in positions of power making harmful decisions on our behalf under the guise of “protection”. Enough allowing our voices to be co-opted by those who would divide us. Enough attempts to remove people’s bodily autonomy - claiming they don’t know their own minds.

WE WILL SPEAK FOR OURSELVES.

So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.

Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law — a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. “I went through pure hell just to get turned away,” Staten said. (The property manager disputed Staten’s account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.)

This previous weekend was particularly nuts, with an older gentleman snatched from the streets of Paris' 14th arrondissement on May 1 by men in ski masks. The 14th is a pleasant place—I highly recommend a visit to the catacombs in Place Denfert-Rochereau—and not usually the site of snatch-and-grab operations. The abducted man was apparently the father of someone who had made a packet in crypto. The kidnappers demanded a multimillion-euro ransom from the man's son.

According to Le Monde, the abducted father was taken to a house in a Parisian suburb, where one of the father's fingers was cut off in the course of ransom negotiations. Police feared "other mutilations" if they were unable to find the man, but they did locate and raid the house this weekend, arresting five people in their 20s. (According to the BBC, French police used "phone signals" to locate the house.)

Sounds crazy, but this was the second such incident this year.