Adrian Heine @adrianheine@mastodon.social

Auch hier auf Mastodon gilt für mich: Du hast Fragen zu HIV/AIDS und anderen STI? Her damit, ich beantworte sie gerne.

Guess this is a good time for an #introduction. I'm Lou, she/her, white, autistic, so-called trans* elder. Been around Fedi since 2018, never used physically located in Berlin, Germany.

I don't post or reply a lot because it's tiring, but I'm an active toot reader. If I post, it's mostly linux/tech, politics, or trans*/queer stuff. Sometimes I post about life in my truck and the intentional community I'm part of. Oh, and crows. I love crows, and animals in general.

I think the glamtifa period was the happiest of my life, hands down. where I was most satisfied with all I was doing, too. and the opsec period was of complete nonfunction, when I couldn't even talk to people or perform basic tasks.

by now I've decided, I'm not ~meant~ to live as a well-behaved girl. I just can't do it. I'm fully willing to deal with any consquences. except anything that happens to you also affects everybody around you; in my case, notably, my children. then again, I trust my community & my children enough that I know they don't want to watch me wither for the sake of security.

there's a line to be negotiated here, I obviously won't go join the ALF and get deported tomorrow therefore ruining the kid's chance at infiltrating the Fortress. but I won't hide from the State out of fear either, much less from nazis. I won't keep all my political opinions¹ sandboxed away from my photos and my names.

(1: they're the correct political opinions.)

the tricky part is negotiating this line. I don't think anybody can do it, if anybody claims to know what we're going through, I consider them misguided. not even the States know what they're doing. I used to assume that things like "going to registered, by-the-books peaceful demos" and "saying in public that Rojava is good" were pretty safe things in privileged European liberal democracies. turns out I was wrong. but I'm not going to *not* say that Rojava is good in public. Rojava is good y'all.

as someone who transitioned at 34 and only then started living, I spent most of my life hiding, out of fear of personal harm. I'm kinda done with it. I can't even think about my old life, or what passed for one, without starting to cry out of grief. I'm at a cafe right now, crying, because I touched the topic. I was meant to be glorious. Do you get what I mean? I would have been glorious. All this living that they took from me and I'll never have. when I look at a photo of my middle-aged skin I don't feel afraid of being old, I feel angry at never having been young.

it wasn't the pain or the violence which took my life from me, I can count in one hand… well, on 2 hands how many times I actually directly got transmisic violence. what really keeps you from living is the trauma. it's the fear. you _know_ that just because someone threw a bottle on your head _one time_ for wearing a jaguar-print scarf, it doesn't mean jaguar-print scarfs are especially bad. you know the chance of bottle-to-the-head is low and random. you got way more robberies and car accidents than bottles. you walked these streets thousands of times, a few of the bravest even with jaguar prints, with no bottles. maybe it wasn't even transmisia? maybe they just were throwing bottles and one of them came for your head. then you don't put on your scarf.

this, this right now, feels like _that_. the hiding. the self-censorship.

and dunno perhaps there's a very pessimistic part of me that plays into it. like I'm speaking on intuition here, don't take me seriously that's a terrible idea, but I can't be the only one, right? I'm not the only one who has been hearing these constant drumbeats for some time now, way before Ukraine, and they ain't exactly the drums of peace. You know? nobody knows what are these times we found ourselves in, but global warming doesn't care how hard we maintain the pretence of normalcy. y'all seeing the situation with Le Pen in France right now? and heavens I don't want to discourage anybody who cares about security to stop caring, please, by all means keep yourself out of government databases, do *not* follow my example I'm the paradigm of risk-seeking behaviour. it's just that, keeping ourselves out of government databases is definitely a very actionable and effective measure to protect ourselves in the short term. in the long term? I don't think it's going to matter. and at this pace I wouldn't bet money on the medium term, either

But it occured to me just now that it also frees up time. Capitalism wants to work us to death partly so we won't have time to talk about revolution. If you free up food prep time, people have time to think.

Providing childcare is revolutionary activity in the same way.

Become ungovernable