How to be a trans ally 101, from To Wong Foo (1995)
i’m reminded of those posts from trans women who stated in their experiences that by far most cis women they interact with in person aren’t transphobic towards them. and that recent study that showed the uk population is more accepting of trans people than they perceive each other to be (ie 2 uk polls, “do you think most people are trans friendly” vs “are you trans friendly”). i think there’s more love and acceptance in this world than transphobes want you to believe. you are not as hated as legislators and conservative news outlets would lead you to believe.
“Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.
“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”
People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.
“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.””
Everyone should read this article about “DOGE” tearing apart USAID (and then read more reporting about how they are being allowed to do the same to other US federal entities). Elon Musk and his minions are violating our highest laws and destroying lives and livelihoods in the US and abroad. USAID is less than 1% of the federal budget— this isn’t about cost-cutting or “investigating fraud”. It’s about cruelty and seeing how much unlawful devastation and psychological warfare they can get away with, with the intention to repeat this process at one federal agency after another. They already have access to IT systems at the Treasury, NOAA, and other agencies, and have taken over OPM (essentially HR for the federal government), using the latter to send demeaning and threatening e-mail blasts to civil servants.
I’m urging everyone who reads this to recognize what’s happening here and how abhorrent and frightening it is. I wager that even most people who wanted Trump back didn’t want a centibillionaire technocrat making unilateral decisions on which parts of the federal government to “feed into the wood chipper” (as he has described his team’s actions at USAID in a recent post on X, The Everything App).
Please call your elected representatives and urge them to act against Musk now— before his actions make our legislative branch totally irrelevant.
I’ve been seeing posts about Musk’s coup-in-progress going around on here, but I feel like a lot of people still aren’t aware of the extent of it, and I really want to help get the word out. I’m heartsick for all the civil servants at USAID and beyond. Some of them, their unions, and some Democratic congresspeople and others are speaking out, but these workers need us everyday Americans to speak out for them, too.
Thank you for reading. And anyone who isn’t American, please keep us in your thoughts.
while being depressing, this is also sort of fascinating to me bc there’s something so…inauthentic here. what i mean is that if you saw something like this back in say 2001 (which you probably wouldn’t, at least for carl’s jr. but i digress) it would seem tacky but in a “sex sells” sort of way.
seeing this in 2025, it’s clearly purely a political statement and you can tell partially bc the image itself is so oddly sexless. it’s like there’s more titillation in the prospect of “owning the libs” than in the image of the scantily clad blonde white woman itself.
There’s this idea on the right that the libs or wokes hate blonde, busty, conventionally attractive white women. I believe it’s a conviction borne of projection: they hate us and all our beliefs and aesthetics, therefore we must do the same. We see this in the idolization of Sydney Sweeney that lasted all of minute until they realized she wasn’t one of them. We see this in the Fox News hostess/Republican Stepford Wife look. Of course it’s nonsense, I love busty blondes as much as the next lesbian, but there’s this conviction that waving a conventionally attractive blonde woman in our faces is owning us.
Of course it is a signifier. Desire is a product of culture. A blonde, youthful, white but tanned, light-eyed, skinny woman: you don’t need to be a sociologist to see the cultural forces, most obviously white supremacy, which would generate and reinforce that as the epitome of sexual attractiveness.
But with the original, as the OP notes, it was sincere and unexamined. It was calculated, yes, but calculated to sell burgers. Here is the all-American Beauty—Marilyn Monroe, Farrah Fawcett, Pamela Anderson—and a burger. You want the girl, because every piece of media you’ve seen since birth days that is what beauty is and that you should desire her, she’s eating a burger, and enjoying it, almost as much as she’d enjoy you, so now you want the burger! Maybe they briefly considered that it’d piss off feminists or conservatives but hey, that’d be free publicity, advertising for the advertising! Now it’s purely a product not to sell a product but to signify a place in the culture war. “Trump won, chud culture is ascendant, therefore we’re going back to our pre-woke ways! Not out of conviction or desire, but to signal out allegiance to the president and his base we’re on their team!”
The original was selling the American Dream: a hot, juicy burger, an ice cold Coke, getting lucky with the girl next door in a new American made car. This is selling a simulacra, the phantom of the American Dream not for its own sake, not to enjoy, but to show contempt for those you hate.
amhrancas 