When we had our weekly video call with North on Sunday morning, Beth commented that it seemed like more than a week since we’d seen them. North pointed out it had been almost exactly a week, as we’d dropped them off at the Frederick park-and-ride at 11:30 the previous Sunday and it was currently 11:15 a.m. But it was an eventful week, wasn’t it? Trans Day of Visibility on Monday, Senator Cory Booker’s historic speech from Monday through Tuesday, the encouraging results of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on Tuesday, the tariffs being announced, also on Tuesday, and the stock market tanking over the following few days, and Hands Off rallies at 1,400 separate locations nationwide on Saturday. Plus, a small, happy thing happened on our porch on Wednesday.
Monday: Trans Day of Visibility
On the last day of March, just a day after North left for school, Beth and I went to a Trans Day of Visibility rally. On my way to meet Beth at her office, I spotted a woman with a sign that said, “You’re Worried About the Wrong 1%” on the Takoma Metro platform and I knew she was going to the same place I was.
It made me think how differently that 1% estimate of the trans population is used rhetorically than the 10% estimate of the whole LGBTQ+ community was used back in the 80s, 90s, and beyond. People used to imply that 10% was a sizable minority, one big enough to be considered mainstream and to deserve rights we didn’t currently have (like marriage equality or employment nondiscrimination). Now the 1% statistic is used to imply that the trans community is so tiny that it won’t bother anyone and should not have any rights it currently has—in some places—taken away (like using public restrooms or playing school sports or getting accurate identification). It’s a disheartening difference. The ask is just “please leave us alone” or to phrase it a different way, “hands off.”
I met up with Beth at her office and we walked to the rally, which was at the very edge of the mall, right across the street from the Capitol. It was a warm, overcast afternoon, with rain forecast, and we’d both forgotten to bring a rain jacket or an umbrella. But the atmosphere was festive, and the crowd was the biggest of the three trans rallies I’ve been to since February, despite the threat of a storm. There was music playing when we arrived, and I commented to Beth that we shouldn’t have any trouble hearing when the speakers, as they had a good sound system. We sat on the grass near the stage with our signs—Beth’s made by North—and waited and people watched, which is always fun in a queer crowd.
The music played through the whole event in between the speakers. Some was probably chosen because of the artist (Kim Petras) and others because of the lyrics (Kacy Musgraves’ “High Horse.”) It kept the mood energetic. I also liked that each speaker introduced the next one, which kept things moving along without longer breaks between each person.
And speaking of the speakers, I mentioned when I wrote about the last trans rally that we attended that these are the only ones with no elected officials. Well, I need to take that back. There was elected official after elected official, a lot of Congressional representatives and some state-level officials as well. In fact, there might have been too many of them. Their speeches started to run together after a while, though Representatives Summer Lee and Maxwell Frost were particularly forceful. I noticed almost all of them mentioned a trans relative, which made me wonder, is that what takes for elected officials to be brave enough to speak up for trans folks?
It made me think how nice it had been that at the second trans rally we went to, several weeks earlier, nearly all the speakers were trans. That was more of an in-group gathering, and this was more of an expression of allyship. But both are necessary, and I was glad to see both, and for elected officials to see that people will turn out for trans folks, in case they need that encouragement to do the right thing.
At one point one of the speakers noted that the crowd on the mall was sitting in the sun while the Capitol behind the stage was in shadow. Eventually, though, it did rain, not for long, but hard. Not too many people left, though. Folks held their signs above their heads (I did this) or draped themselves in their pride flags. Another speaker noted that you need rain and sun to make a rainbow.
We got home on the late side, so it was nice to be able to dig into the grilled cheese sandwiches and soup Noah had made for our dinner while we were on the bus coming home.
Wednesday: Fledglings
If you’ve been reading here long, you may know we get mourning doves nesting on a ledge on our porch every spring. Occasionally, there’s more than one nest a year, but the predictable one happens in March through April. The nest does not always result in fledglings. Sometimes the eggs fail to hatch, sometimes the nest is attacked by predators. So, I try not to get attached. Guess how well that goes? But in attempt not to break other people’s hearts, I’ve stopped posting much about the chicks on Facebook or here until I know whether there’s a happy ending. Well, this year we had a happy ending.
The dove parents had been sitting on the nest for a few weeks when North was home. (Mourning doves are egalitarian parents, the mother and father take turns on the nest.) I told North I thought maybe the eggs wouldn’t hatch. Late March was colder than usual, and I thought the mother may have laid the eggs too early. But a day or two before North went back to school, I caught a glimpse of one of the parents feeding a chick. It wasn’t tiny either, so I guess the parents did a good job hiding them after they hatched, and they continued to hide them. It wasn’t until after North was gone that I spied two good-sized chicks alone in the nest. They looked almost ready to fledge.
Sure enough, on Wednesday, around lunch time, I spotted them out of the nest, sitting together on a pile of sandbags on the porch wall. Noah came out to get some photos. The dove chicks stayed there all the rest of the day, not taking any of the little test flights across the porch young doves often take. When one of the parents came back to the nest and called to them, they ignored it and stuck to their post. (“Hands off, Mom and Dad,” I imagined them saying.) I wondered if they’d ever leave the porch wall. But the next morning, they were gone. Beth has since spotted one of them perching on the hammock in the side yard.
It always makes me happy when the dove chicks survive and leave the porch for the outside world, but this year it made me even happier than usual. I think I desperately needed a win, even if that win is as small as two more live birds living in my yard.
Saturday: Hands Off
Saturday morning Beth and I went to the Hands Off rally by the Washington Monument. I know a lot of you went to these events in your hometowns. I saw pictures on Facebook from all over. Both of our mothers went, mine in Sacramento and Beth’s in Wheeling. I’ve heard the total number of participants was in the hundreds of thousands, or two million, or three million, or five million. It’s hard to say. I can say, though, that the D.C. crowd was the largest protest I’ve seen since the original Women’s March in 2017.
We met up with people from various unions at the AFL-CIO building. I’d never been in that lobby before, and I was taken with the beautiful mural. I’d been in a rush to leave that morning and hadn’t had time to make a sign, but they had sign-making materials, so I customized a Hands Off sign by adding a list of causes and vulnerable populations: Foreign Aid, Free Press, Canada, Greenland, Panama, NATO, Science, Trans People, Federal Workers, Unions, Immigrants. It was what I came up with off the top of my head. I wondered later if I should have left NATO off the list, since what we truly want is more of a hands-on approach to the alliance.
The AFL-CIO building is a couple blocks from the White House so after taking pictures of the labor delegation, we walked the half hour or so to the Washington Monument, chanting all the way. When we chanted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting!” I said to Beth it was really kind of an open-ended question to get just one answer, especially these days.
The speakers were on the Sylvan Theater stage, but without jumbotrons (which would have been a good idea) there was no way the vast majority of the people there could get anywhere close enough to hear, so people were wandering around the grounds of the monument or clustering together to listen to drumming and to do their own separate chants in smaller groups. Beth skillfully steered us close enough to the stage that we could hear a lot (but not all) of the speeches. It was packed there and hard to move around, so I could only see signs for one tiny slice of the throng, but even so, I saw a lot.
Several people made signs that made MAGA spell different things. My two favorites were: “Morons Are Governing America” and “Make Authoritarianism Go Away.” Of course, many people went with the rally theme and chose either a single issue or like me, a laundry list. I saw “Hands Off My Future” (held by a teen girl), “Hands Off LGBTQ Rights,” “Hands Off the Constitution,” and “Hands Off Our Medical Care, Unions, Benefits, Bodies, Schools, Parks & Oceans.” I thought “Will Trade Racists for Refugees” was a good one, too. Flags—American, Canadian, Ukrainian, Rainbow, and Trans— fluttered in the breeze.
As I said, from where we were standing, up on a hill closer to the Monument than the stage, we could hear a lot of the speakers. There was a preacher who was very fired up, an undocumented immigrant talking about the threats to her community, and Jamie Raskin was there, because he’s almost always there, but I don’t get tired of hearing my Congressional representative speak. We also heard Maxwell Frost again. We arrived a little after eleven and the program was supposed to go until three-thirty, but we left around two when the speakers became inaudible again and enough people left that it was easy to walk away.
On the way to the Metro, we stopped at an ice cream truck and split a brownie sundae. Then when we got home, Noah and I made a spinach paneer lasagna. I was tired from standing and walking for several hours, so I did all the KP tasks (chopping, grating, etc.) sitting at the dining room table and he did the mixing and sautéing standing in the kitchen.
Post-Rally Pause
That was five days ago. Since then, there’s been chaos in the markets with the tariffs being paused and a bill has passed the House with such stringent voting requirements that it would potentially disenfranchise people without passports and married women who took their husbands’ last names. Plus, more information keeps coming out about the hundreds of mostly Venezuelan immigrants, most with no criminal records, abducted from the U.S. and sent to what can only be called a concentration camp in El Salvador with no due process whatsoever. Just another week in the second Trump administration.
But it’s been relatively quiet on the home front. In her capacity as Communications Director of CWA, Beth has hosted a couple evening Zoom calls for labor activists, one of which Jamie Raskin attended, and she introduced him. I am almost finished with a monograph on household toxins I’ve been writing on and off for a year but working on steadily for the past four weeks. For the first time in a long while, we don’t have any protests on the horizon. I could use a rest. But not too long a rest, because these are terrifying times, and we need to keep making our voices heard.